I'd like to start a discussion on compare and contrast between these two web servers. Has anyone evaluated both?
Thanks! Chirag
I'd like to start a discussion on compare and contrast between these two web servers. Has anyone evaluated both?
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
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
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.
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.
-- Cheers! - Pratik 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 
>> 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
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