Ok so I’ve decided to use LiteSpeed as my web server over apache, lighttpd and nginx.

Why? Even tho most rails developers are moving towards using nginx and a mongrel cluster or something similar, I like what litespeed are doing, and the foundation behind it.

Unlike the other systems, there’s a company behind them that you can call on for support – it’s a commercial product, so bugfixes will be regular and of urgency and things will keep evolving.

Nginx is mostly in Russian still and lighttpd doesn’t have much power.

Early on in my research I cut lighttpd out as an option totally, it’s really slow and just not what I want.

Other considerations were memory usage, not only of the webserver, but of the mongrel processes.

Mongrel can use a fair bit, so for us, hosting 20+ rails dependant sites and having all those extra mongrel processes staying alive without them being used is a big memory load, this is where I start to like litespeed a lot over the rest.

You see with Litespeed, it controls the mongrels direct with an api that’s a ruby gem, it will load the mongrels automatically when they are needed and shut them down when they aren’t, which is also good if your app has issues or memory leaks because it’ll start fresh again soon enough.

Also, having mongrel tied in to litespeed, there’s one less layer to stumble through, with lighttpd, apache or nginx there’s 3 ‘layers’… the web server, the mongrel and then your app. With litespeed, it’s just it and your app.

Next major win is that litespeed has a really good web interface for controlling it all, the virtual host for your site, the integration, the mongrel processes, the whole web server and all. So no more digging through config files on linux and hours of shell usage to get things going, you just use the slick web interface, which also displays real-time stats and logging.

Even though litespeed is commercial, they have a free version available that will handle most people’s needs, if you have a very high bandwidth site then you’re probably making cash so if you need a license to handle more than the free 150 simultaneous connections it’s only about $30 a month to handle 300 or more I think.

Anyway, there’s been a good debate on ruby forum about it all not too long ago…

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/137579

Aside from all that, installing litespeed is super easy, slice host have a 3 step manual on their wiki.

http://wiki.slicehost.com/doku.php?id=install_litespeed_on_ubuntu

After those easy steps are done you need to setup your rails app in the webserver – so you’ll need to create a virtual host, similar to apache but also with linking in the mongrel functionality.

Also, don’t forget that you need to setup your dns in the SliceHost control panel too.

To setup your virtual hosts, best bet is to follow this manual

http://www.litespeedtech.com/support/wiki/doku.php?id=litespeed_wiki:ruby_rails

Anyway, I did all this already on our local box, I’m doing it now on slicehost, will post about any differences to the manual if I have problems.