Staff

I abandoned OpenLiteSpeed and went back to good ol’ Nginx

Features, hosting, litespeed, litespeed web server, Nginx, openlitespeed, php, php-fpm, space city weather, Staff, Tech, web hosting, web server / Ari B / January 27, 2024

Adventures in server babysitting —

One weather site’s sudden struggles, and musings on why change isn’t always good.

Lee Hutchinson – Jan 26, 2024 3: 29 pm UTC

Since 2017, in what spare time I have (ha!), I help my colleague Eric Berger host his Houston-area weather forecasting site, Space City Weather. It’s an interesting hosting challenge—on a typical day, SCW does maybe 20,000–30,000 page views to 10,000–15,000 unique visitors, which is a relatively easy load to handle with minimal work. But when severe weather events happen—especially in the summer, when hurricanes lurk in the Gulf of Mexico—the site’s traffic can spike to more than a million page views in 12 hours. That level of traffic requires a bit more prep to handle.

For a very long time, I ran SCW on a backend stack made up of HAProxy for SSL termination, Varnish Cache for on-box caching, and Nginx for the actual web server application—all fronted by Cloudflare to absorb the majority of the load. (I wrote about this setup at length on Ars a few years ago for folks who want some more in-depth details.) This stack was fully battle-tested and ready to devour whatever traffic we threw at it, but it was also annoyingly complex, with multiple cache layers to contend with, and that complexity made troubleshooting issues more difficult than I would have liked.

So during some winter downtime two years ago, I took the opportunity to jettison some complexity and reduce the hosting stack down to a single monolithic web server application: OpenLiteSpeed.

Out with the old, in with the new

I didn’t know too much about OpenLiteSpeed (“OLS” to its friends) other than that it’s mentioned a bunch in discussions about WordPress hosting—and since SCW runs WordPress, I started to get interested. OLS seemed to get a lot of praise for its integrated caching, especially when WordPress was involved; it was purported to be quite quick compared to Nginx; and, frankly, after five-ish years of admining the same stack, I was interested in changing things up. OpenLiteSpeed it was!

The OLS admin console, showing vhosts. This is from my personal web server rather than the Space City Weather server, but it looks the same. If you want some deeper details on the OLS config I was using, <a href= — Enlarge / The OLS admin console, showing vhosts. This is from my personal web server rather than the Space City Weather server, but it looks the same. If you want some deeper details on the OLS config I was using, check my blog. Yeah, I still have a blog. I’m old.

Lee Hutchinson

The first significant adjustment to deal with was that OLS is primarily configured through an actual GUI, with all the annoying potential issues that brings with it (another port to secure, another password to manage, another public point of entry into the backend, more PHP resources dedicated just to the admin interface). But the GUI was fast, and it mostly exposed the settings that needed exposing. Translating the existing Nginx WordPress configuration into OLS-speak was a good acclimation exercise, and I eventually settled on Cloudflare tunnels as an acceptable method for keeping the admin console hidden away and notionally secure.

Enlarge / Just a taste of the options that await within the LiteSpeed Cache WordPress plugin.

Lee Hutchinson

The other major adjustment was the OLS LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress, which is the primary tool one uses to configure how WordPress itself interacts with OLS and its built-in cache. It’s a massive plugin with pages and pages of configurable options, many of which are concerned with driving utilization of the Quic.Cloud CDN service (which is operated by LiteSpeed Technology, the company that created OpenLiteSpeed and its for-pay sibling, LiteSpeed).

Getting the most out of WordPress on OLS meant spending some time in the plugin, figuring out which of the options would help and which would hurt. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are plenty of ways in there to get oneself into stupid amounts of trouble by being too aggressive with caching.) Fortunately, Space City Weather provides a great testing ground for web servers, being a nicely active site with a very cache-friendly workload, and so I hammered out a starting configuration with which I was reasonably happy and, while speaking the ancient holy words of ritual, flipped the cutover switch. HAProxy, Varnish, and Nginx went silent, and OLS took up the load.

I abandoned OpenLiteSpeed and went back to good ol’ Nginx Read More »

The 20 most-read stories of 2023

Staff, Year in review / Blake Jones / December 26, 2023

Every so often, you live through a year that you know you’re going to remember. Sometimes it’s because of a personal milestone. Other times it’s because of noteworthy events that affected all of us in one way or another. And in some years, it’s because we were all surprised by unanticipated and rapid technological advances.

2023 definitely will be a year that will be remembered. On the tech side, the biggest story was AI, due in no small part to rapid advances in large language models. We had news about space flight, hackers, operating systems, and even music players.

Read on to find out which stories resonated the most with our readers throughout the year.

20. The Ars guide to time travel in the movies

Depending on the screenwriting, time travel can be one of the best plot devices in a movie… or one of the most confusing, if done poorly. As we have come to better understand the nature of time, Hollywood has begun producing more flicks that use it as part of the story.

Our ace science reporter Jennifer Ouellette happens to be married to a physicist with his own subreddit, so we decided to turn them loose on the topic of time travel and the movies to see which films had the best combination of entertainment and scientific rigor. Read on to find out where Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, 12 Monkeys, and Hot Tub Time Machine ended up.

19. The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

Largely considered relics of a bygone computing era, over 10,000 mainframe computers are still used today. Used primarily by Fortune 500 companies, most of these mainframes are sold by IBM. With a lineage dating back to technological advancements of the 1950s, these computers still excel with some high-volume use cases, especially those involving banking.

There used to be a bunch of companies in the mainframe game, but Rand, GE, NEC, Honeywell, and just about everyone else either no longer exists or is no longer building mainframes. IBM is now the only mainframe manufacturer that matters, so check out the story to learn why some companies still do some of their computing on mainframes instead of in the cloud.

18. macOS 14 Sonoma: The Ars Technica review

I cannot remember a top-20 list that didn’t include a macOS review. But this may be the furthest down the list it has ever appeared, and this is actually the only OS review to appear on this year’s list.

This is due in no small part to how major OS updates come out like clockwork once a year, even when there are no major new features to excite users. These days, OS updates can be met with grumbling due to unnecessary UI changes and hardware obsolescence. Sonoma is another “low key” update, as Andrew Cunningham described it in his usual, comprehensive review. Call it “Ventura plus” or whatever you like—Sonoma is business as usual.

17. Android app from China executed 0-day exploit on millions of devices

Ah, it’s our first 0-day of the 2023 countdown. This one primarily affected users of third-party app stores and involved the Pinduoduo app, downloaded millions of times. As Dan Goodin described it:

“[T]he malicious Pinduoduo app includes functionality allowing for the app to be installed covertly with no ability to be uninstalled, falsely inflating the number of Pinduoduo daily active users and monthly active users, uninstalling competitor apps, stealing user privacy data, and evading various privacy compliance regulations.”

Yikes.

The versions of the app in Google Play and Apple’s App Store did not contain the backdoor.

The 20 most-read stories of 2023 Read More »