Monkeytreats

LiteSpeed kicks ass

It used to always strike me as odd that people would bother using anything besides Apache for serving up web pages. It’s kind of a pain to configure, but it’s well understood, everybody uses it, it’s open source, and it works.

Upon entering the Rails world, though, if you run Apache, it feels like you’re a football player in a cowboy hat trying to hang with the scenester kids. Sure, you’re tough, solid, widely respected by the mainstream, but all the goth kids who run lighttpd are never going to be impressed by you. Nor are the straightedge kids running nginx, or the…I don’t know, I can’t think of a good subculture for LiteSpeed. It’s fast, good, polished, but not open source? Kind of a sellout, given that it’s proprietary? The kids who listen to Kanye West, maybe? Once again my metaphors fly off a cliff and explode in a flaming ball of aborted meaning, ripped from the womb untimely.

It might be simpler and shorter to say that I think LiteSpeed is a very good web server.

I haven’t run stress tests yet, so I can’t speak to its performance, but I’m really impressed by how easy it is to use. The web admin interface is a bit Byzantine, but in 3.0 they’ve improved it enormously over the ungainly (but nonetheless useful) UI mess that shipped with 2.2. The truly great things about it, though are LSAPI and autoupdate.

LSAPI is handily packaged as a gem, and provides LiteSpeed the ability to spawn Rails processes as needed to handle requests, without having a pool of standalone Mongrels running all the time. It gets Rails a step closer to the straightforward quality of something like mod_php.

Autoupdate does pretty much what you’d expect, only I wouldn’t expect it of a web server. It checks at a configured interval to see if there’s a new version of LiteSpeed, and then it downloads and installs it for you. To upgrade, you just go into the admin interface and click a link, and it switches over to the new version–while considerately retaining the old version, so you can switch back to it if necessary. Bad ass.

It’s only free as in beer, though, not as in speech. Does it make me a bad, unprincipled person if I give up my essential software liberties for a little temporary software simplicity? Yeah, probably. I guess I’ll drown my ethical qualms in all that free beer.