# Nignx vs litespeed

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/nignx-vs-litespeed/122386>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [December 7, 2007, 7:32am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/nignx-vs-litespeed/122386 "2007-12-07T07:32:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 7\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![chirag](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/ecccb3/32.png) [@chirag](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/chirag)\
**Post date:** [December 7, 2007, 7:32am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/nignx-vs-litespeed/122386/1 "2007-12-07T07:32:43Z")

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I’d like to start a discussion on compare and contrast between these  
two web servers. Has anyone evaluated both?

[http://nginx.net/](http://nginx.net/)

> **[LiteSpeed | Internet. Accelerated. - LiteSpeed Technologies](https://litespeedtech.com/)**
>
> LiteSpeed provides one-stop web-acceleration solutions that embrace and advance cutting-edge technologies. Web server, load balancer, cache solutions, and more.

Thanks!  
Chirag

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**Author:** ![chirag](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/ecccb3/32.png) [@chirag](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/chirag)\
**Post date:** [December 7, 2007, 7:32pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/nignx-vs-litespeed/122386/2 "2007-12-07T19:32:15Z")

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> I’d like to start a discussion on compare and contrast between these  
> two web servers. Has anyone evaluated both?
> 
> [http://nginx.net/](http://nginx.net/)  
> [http://litespeedtech.com/](http://litespeedtech.com/)

I’ve used nginx, but not for running rails. We use litespeed at work  
and  
it works great. I also use it at home mostly because i have several  
sites  
with very little traffic and it does a good job of starting/stopping the  
lsapi (rails) processes as needed.

Their GUI configuration has come a long way in recent releases. It can  
take a little bit to wrap your head around how they do some things and  
if  
you try and edit the config files manually be careful (it’s all XML).

One nice thing is the ability to setup a vhost template and then add  
domains to it. Change the template, everything else changes.

If you’re coming from Apache and have mucked with the log file format  
and/or a lot of the rewriting rules you may find some incompatibilities.  
Not many, but there are some things that work a little differently.

If you run it on OSX and get tired of hearing your disk scratch see this  
post for a work around:

[http://blog.pjkh.com/articles/2007/03/27/litespeed-osx-and-disk-scratching](http://blog.pjkh.com/articles/2007/03/27/litespeed-osx-and-disk-scratching)

Overall I like litespeed. Note - all my experience is with the  
free/standard version. Also note that litespeed isn’t _open_. It’s  
free  
though if you don’t need the enterprise features.

-philip

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**Author:** ![chirag](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/ecccb3/32.png) [@chirag](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/chirag)\
**Post date:** [December 9, 2007, 4:08am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/nignx-vs-litespeed/122386/3 "2007-12-09T04:08:38Z")

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I agree with philip. I use litespeed to host rails,php and it works very  
well 🙂  
Also it has greate update system (1 click and we get new version).  
Admining by web interface is very useful.

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**Author:** ![chirag](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/ecccb3/32.png) [@chirag](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/chirag)\
**Post date:** [December 9, 2007, 1:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/nignx-vs-litespeed/122386/4 "2007-12-09T13:35:33Z")

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Litespeed is probably faster than all other rails solutions. My  
benchmaks suggested it was faster than evented mongrel as well. Only  
reason people don’t use litespeed a lot is, they’re easily scared of  
by 150 connection limit, without really understaning what it means.

On Dec 7, 2007 6:31 AM, chirag [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> 

–  
Cheers!

- Pratik  
[http://m.onkey.org](http://m.onkey.org)

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**Author:** ![chirag](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/ecccb3/32.png) [@chirag](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/chirag)\
**Post date:** [December 9, 2007, 3:52pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/nignx-vs-litespeed/122386/5 "2007-12-09T15:52:39Z")

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Pratik Naik wrote:

> Litespeed is probably faster than all other rails solutions. My  
> benchmaks suggested it was faster than evented mongrel as well. Only  
> reason people don’t use litespeed a lot is, they’re easily scared of  
> by 150 connection limit, without really understaning what it means.
> 
> On Dec 7, 2007 6:31 AM, chirag [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:
> 
> > 
> 
> –  
> Cheers!
> 
> - Pratik  
> [http://m.onkey.org](http://m.onkey.org)

So, what it means? I was confused by this limit too…

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![chirag](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/ecccb3/32.png) [@chirag](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/chirag)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2007, 4:18am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/nignx-vs-litespeed/122386/6 "2007-12-10T04:18:04Z")

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> > - Pratik  
> > [http://m.onkey.org](http://m.onkey.org)
> 
> So, what it means? I was confused by this limit too…

It means that as soon as you have 151 connections that 151st one will  
fail.

It does _NOT_ mean that you can only serve 150 requests/second. Unless  
of  
course each request takes an entire second (or more).

Even if it did take 1 secdond/request, if evenly spread out through the  
day that’s 12,960,000 requests. That’s a _lot_ of traffic. More than  
most of us will see in a day 🙂

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![chirag](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/ecccb3/32.png) [@chirag](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/chirag)\
**Post date:** [December 10, 2007, 3:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/nignx-vs-litespeed/122386/7 "2007-12-10T15:16:22Z")

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> > > > Only reason people don’t use litespeed a lot is, they’re easily scared of by 150 connection limit, without really understaning what it means.

> > > > It means that as soon as you have 151 connections that 151st one will fail.

The 151st connection doesn’t fail, it is queued until one of the  
current 150 connections is finished.

From the LiteSpeed staff

> **[LiteSpeed 3.0 Web Server Beta](https://www.litespeedtech.com/support/forum/threads/litespeed-3-0-web-server-beta.750/)**
>
> LiteSpeed Web Server 3.0 public beta has been released.
> 
> 3.0beta has been production tested and is deemed stable. We still recommend early adopters to test on development server before going live on production. This is pre-release software and we...

It’s not Concurrent Users, rather it’s max connections or in another  
words, max concurrent connections. 150 concurrent connections can  
support magnitudes more concurrent users, unless you have users that  
are downloading very large files that takes a long time to process.

So if 150 users are all downloading a 50MB file at the same second,  
that would be 150 connections and if the 151st user comes in to  
download and you have the standard edition, the connection request is  
queued meaning it will not be processed until someone out of the  
initial 150 download finishes.

Thanks,  
John
