Introduction
Overview
LiteSpeed web server is a high performance, secure and easy-to-use web server.
It can handle thousands of concurrent connections with small memory footprint.
It is much stronger and less vulnerable when facing various attacks.
Standard Features
HTTP/1.1
- Chunked Transfer Encoding
- Basic Authentication
- Entity Tag
- Range/Multi-range Request
- Response Compression(gzip)
The following features will be supported in the near future:
- Multi-Language/Content Negotiation
- Digest Authentication
Dynamic Content Generation
LiteSpeed Web Server support the following dynamic content generation methods:
- CGI/1.1
- Fast CGI
- PHP (through Fast CGI interface)
- JSP/Servlet (interface to back-end Servlet engine)
- Proxy (interface to any web server/application server that support HTTP protocol)
Virtual Hosting
LiteSpeed web server supports IP based and name based virtual hosting.
.htaccess support
Access control, authentication and redirection directives can be placed in per-directory access control file without changing server's main configuration. Unlike Apache, enabling .htaccess support will not severely degrade server's performance.
Security
LiteSpeed web server provides the following security features:
SSL
Supports SSLv2/SSLv3/TLSv1.
IP Level Throttling
Network bandwidth to and from a single IP address can be limited regardless
number of connections.
Comprehensive Connection Accounting
Comprehensive control of concurrent connections allowed from a single IP address.
Access Control
Access control rules can be set at server, virtual host or per-directory (context)
level.
External Application Shield
LiteSpeed web server shields CGI, Fast CGI and Servlet engine from talking directly
to web clients to ensure maximum reliability and performance.
CGI Resources Consumption Limit
LiteSpeed web server limits system resources that can be consumed by CGI applications to prevent server overloading caused by bad CGI script.
suEXEC and chroot CGI script
LiteSpeed web server can run CGI script in a chroot jail and/or in user/group ID different from web server's UID/GID, minimizes possible damages of vulnerable CGI scripts.
DoS Attack Prevention
LiteSpeed web server is much less vulnerable to HTTP Denial Of Service(DoS)
and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, thanks to the IP level throttling,
connection accounting and its outstanding performance and scalability.
Chroot [Professional Edition only]
LiteSpeed web server can run in chroot environment (known as a chroot jail).
Reliability
LiteSpeed Web server runs completely in user space.
The server can be easily upgraded and the reliability of OS is not affected.
CGI, Fast CGI and servlet engine run in their standalone processes, the
reliability of web server is not affected by the quality of third party software.
LiteSpeed web server is capable of instant recovering from crash automatically.
Scalability & Performance
LiteSpeed Web Server uses non-blocking event-driven IO to serve all requests
with single threaded processes, requires much less system resources than multiprocessing
or multithreaded web servers. LiteSpeed web server is capable of serving thousands
of clients concurrently. It provides outstanding performance for both static
and dynamic contents because of its architecture and the level of optimization
applied. Avoiding scheduling and synchronization makes the server highly efficient.
For static content, LiteSpeed web server can provides up-to 3-6 times better performance than Apache. The network bandwidth becomes a bottleneck in most cases.
For dynamic content, LiteSpeed web server meets or beats the performance of
embedded modules found in other web servers, like Apache's mod_php.
With its lite-weight CGI daemon, LiteSpeed web server delievers highest possible CGI performance.
LiteSpeed web server can utilize Unix domain socket for high performance inter-process communication.
For more information, please take a look at our
benchmark results.
User friendly
- No need to build the executable yourself.
- Easy to install.
- Easy to control and configure through the web administration
interface.
- Apply most changes without restarting the server.
Compatibility
LiteSpeed web server is designed to be interchangeable with popular Web Server Apache.
Currently, functionality of following modules of Apache has been implemented:
mod_alias, mod_access, mod_auth, mod_cgi, mod_ssl, mod_php, mod_fastcgi, mod_jk, mod_gzip/mod_deflate, mod_throttle, mod_proxy, etc.
The following modules will be implemented soon:
mod_rewrite, mod_negotiation, mod_digest, mod_ssi, mod_perl.