I.NFECTIO.US: LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support

LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support

Bob Silva — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 15:45:00 -0700

LiteSpeed Web Server is a commercial product being marketed as "the world's best performing Ruby SAPI and easiest Ruby on Rails application setup". Having used LiteSpeed for over 6 months now and after running my own tests, I agree with that statement whole-heartedly. Being a recent Apple convert, to me LiteSpeed is the OS X of the web server world. Not open source, but it looks and works great and the developers actually listen to what the users need.

LiteSpeed offers a Standard Edition which is free for private and commercial use, the only restriction being that your site can't serve content related to pornography, warez or illegal activities. This is an odd restriction, but I guess it's cool that they stand by their principles.

To keep things DRY, I won't repeat LiteSpeeds feature set here. Instead, I'll "show" you why I choose LiteSpeed and why I think you should give it a test drive as well. I've put together two screencasts for your viewing pleasure. The first will demonstrate just how easy it is to get up and running with LiteSpeed. From installing the server to a fully deployed Rails application in under 4 minutes. Live and uncut. It moves along pretty fast, but I felt it was a good demonstration of the effort the LiteSpeed developers have put into supporting Ruby on Rails. In the second screencast, we'll take a more in-depth look at some of the cool features of LiteSpeed Web Server. Hope you enjoy them, I had fun making them.

Up and Running with Rails in Under 4 Minutes - 3:25 runtime - Flash

LiteSpeed In-Depth - 21:35 runtime - Flash

UPDATE: The screencasts show that you have to copy dispatch.lsapi into your public directory, with the 2.2 release, this requirement is lifted. The ruby-lsapi gem still needs to be installed, but LiteSpeed will handle the dispatching to Rails through their LSAPI automatically.

UPDATE: When running the script to restart LiteSpeed, make sure you run it as a user with root priviledges. So for Mac users: sudo lswsctrl restart

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by bobby

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 20:59:19 -0700

Hi, Bob. I just got a VPS with Rimuhosting, and found out no one else was using LiteSpeed over there. I'm a newbie at administering my own VPS, but I really want to try out LiteSpeed. My intent is to host a few (3 or 4) Rails apps and sundry CMS sites using PHP/MySQL for clients. My question is, looking at your screencast, is this a good scenario to use Litespeed in? Will it work with Capsitrano and Subversion? I'm just following instructions by the book, so I am basically looking to be pointed in the right direction.

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by Radixhound

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 22:05:40 -0700

Hmm.. bummer. I finally tried updating to the latest LSWS and now I'm having a problem with setting up my rails app. When I set it up the simple way (ala 4 minute demo), the server crashes when I try to do a graceful restart. So far I'm totally stumped.

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by Amr

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 10:03:10 -0700

Radixhound: upgrade to the latest LSWS (2.2.2) and ruby-lsapi version 1.8 . this seems to have solved the problem for me.

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by Radixhound

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 10:45:49 -0700

I've set up a server with litespeed to do some testing. I really like the web interface and the ease of setting up rails apps! One thing that I'm investigating though is the memory usage. It creates many ruby processes of about 85456kb each, so memory gets chewed up fast. Any idea how this compares to Apache + Mongrel?

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by Amr

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 15:02:23 -0700

Spoke too soon, I can get it with A records or aliases. Thanks much! -Amr

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by Amr

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 14:33:49 -0700

Bob, thanks for the pointer, I will check that out. I did have the 2.2 and lsapi installed but I forgot one more thing, I had the rails app running under "development" while my virtual host was configured to look at "production" in the rails context tab. When I aligned those two by changing the value in database.yml to "production:" , it worked like a charm! Many Thanks!!! :))

Re: the VHosts all assigned to 80, are you giving each an "A" record on the DNS side? What I mean is, lets say I have tingoo.com, but I want to run forum.tingoo.com on 80 but want it to point to a different doc-root (RAILS_HOME) as it is a separate app, so basically I do still have to create an A record for each of the subdomain like x.tingoo.com, y.tingoo.com etc. then have the VHOST point to x.tingoo.com and then have 80 listener bound to this newly added VHOST. do I have this understood correctly?

Please forgive me for hijacking your comments thread like this.

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by Bob Silva

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 14:09:17 -0700

Amr, You can run unlimited Virtual Hosts in LiteSpeed, the sample I showed was my legacy domains server (running PHP). On my Rails production server I run 6 apps, all on port 80 as well. LiteSpeed uses name based virtual hosts much like apache does. Just add virtual hosts to your port 80 listener and give each a unique domain name. When a request arrives, LiteSpeed will look at the Host: header and determine which Virtual Host to send the request to. If you aren't using version 2.2 yet, be sure to upgrade and move your Rails apps to the new Rails context style of implementation. Also, make sure you have ruby-lsapi installed.

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by Amr

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 13:45:09 -0700

Thanks Bob, good to know, one less wrong tree for me to bark up :) . I did do the DEBUG mode thing, but didn't seem to find anything different as compared to the other VHOST which is serving the other rails app fine. Can't thank you enough for this screencast! really, this is extremely helpful, many many thanks.

BTW, I saw you are running quite a few virtual hosts on a single LSWS instance. Do you have a writeup on that by chance? I mean running multiple rails apps under the same litespeed server (kind of what you have already setup..) I think I'm going about it in a very convoluted way (different listener on each ip with different ports and then the different rails app on that doc-root.. its really weird.. I think you'r setup is simpler because I only saw one listener on port 80)

sorry if this question is too n00bish, and thanks for the screencast again!

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by Bob Silva

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 12:08:26 -0700

I run most of my development on edge through LiteSpeed, I also freeze all my production apps to a TAG and haven't had any problems. LiteSpeed only interfaces with the Dispatcher, it has nothing to do with how the Rails framework gets loaded. I'd suspect a missing configuration option somewhere. Be sure to check LiteSpeeds logs (Toggle the Debug Logging) and tail your development.log in your Rails to see if the request even arrives.

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by Amr

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 11:04:02 -0700

Thanks so much for posting it. Have you had any luck running applications using frozen edge rails versions? I'm trying to get Beast to work with litespeed, and though I can serve beast from webrick or lighty, when I try to get the app served through litespeed it just sits there and times out.

I have litespeed serving other rails apps from two separate document-roots on two different ip/port combos.

so I'm guessing there may be a trick to run the frozen edge rails apps with litespeed? assumption being that running an app with rails frozen (edge in this case) in the vendor dir, throws litespeed a curveball or sumpin'

any comments on that would be most welcome!

Thanks, Amr

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by Bob Silva

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 10:29:51 -0700

Hi Chris, Yea, typos handling of it is crap, I need to modify the source to disable the submit button, just haven't gotten around to it yet. I'll delete the extra posts. The 4 minute screencast (I could've made it in 3 with a few more takes) was done from installation to deployed app, so yes it can be easy, but it's even easier when you have been using LiteSpeed for awhile and know how everything fits together. As for Mongrel, LiteSpeed also makes a great load balancing proxy server. Core team member Rick Olson, last I heard was using LiteSpeed to proxy to a mongrel cluster. I'm just saying the LiteSpeeds performance is good enough with Rails, that it isn't necessary to proxy to a mongrel cluster (it's actually reducing your performance).

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by chris

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 09:13:53 -0700

This AJAX posting mechanism is a typical example of when NOT to use ajax. After i'd clicked Submit it wasn't immideately odvious that it had worked. Its made even worse by the "Chris is about to say" box still appearing.

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by chris

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 09:07:22 -0700

If LiteSpeed really is as easy to setup as they say, does it push Mongrel out of the equation?

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by Bob Silva

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 08:25:42 -0700

Not to take anything away from Mongrel, Zed Shaw has done an excellent job programming it, but putting Ruby up against C++ is not a fair comparison. A Mongrel cluster behind a proxy will perform fine for most installations. With that said, I tested Apache 2.2 Load-Balancing to a Mongrel Cluster and LiteSpeed was twice as fast. To avoid contention, I will not post numbers or examples of my tests because I don't know crap about benchmarking. But I'm not blind either, my numbers were sufficient for me to make a decision.

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by chris

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 08:05:03 -0700

does anyone know how it compares in performance to Mongrel?

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by moxie

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 20:43:53 -0700

Great post. Performance and deployment are the concerns we have when develop large scale Rails based system. LightSpeed is very promising. Wish someone comes up with a benchmark comparing all the Rails enabled web server deployment.

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by Bob Silva

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 20:35:01 -0700

Hi Steve, I just tested on my mbp and mp with Firefox and it worked ok, I am unable to test on a PPC powered mac though. Thanks for the heads up.

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by steve odom

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 20:13:35 -0700

Bob, just what I needed. I just started taking a look at litespeed and this helps me tremendously. Keep up the good work. One note. The movies would not play in Firefox for me. Nothing would pull up. But if I used Safari, they worked fine. Steve

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by Carlos Gabaldon

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 20:08:29 -0700

Bob, LiteSpeed looks very cool, great screencasts. I am going to download it and play with it tonight.

"LiteSpeed Web Server 2.2 includes Rails Support" by matt

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 20:05:37 -0700

Very helpful, linked in our forums.