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LiteSpeed Speeds Up XenForo in New Case Study

Our second case study shows LiteSpeed Web Server greatly improving page speeds on a huge XenForo site.

The Case Study

This case study follows the optimization of ForoMTB, Spain’s largest mountain biking forum. Even after optimizing Apache + nginx as a reverse proxy, xCache, and MySQL, LiteSpeed causes a huge difference in load (see graph above) and page load times, knocking page waits down from 30 seconds to under 1 second! And, using the Plesk extension, the switch only takes minutes.

Read the case study and see the results for yourself.

The Difference

This and the previous case study show the importance of having an event-driven backend. While nginx as a reverse proxy can help with static content, to get really improved speeds with your web applications, you need an all-in-one solution. With our control panel plugins, no web server makes it easier to upgrade site speed than LiteSpeed.

Future Studies

We’re very interested in what situations you’d like to see LiteSpeed tackle. While we’re limited by what our users present us with, we’d be happy to search out certain environments if you have a request. Let us know in the comments section.

Tags: case study, showcase

Categories:LiteSpeed Web Server , Performance

Comments

Michael January 2nd, 2014
And, Alfa1, sorry for not responding earlier, but I wan’t quite sure what you were referring to. We have a plugin for vBulletin that helps use LSCache with vBulletin. I can’t imagine anyone using LSCache and Varnish together… (Though perhaps I’m just unimaginative.)
Cheers,
m
Michael January 2nd, 2014
Hi PS,
Agreed. Optimizing software, plugins, and databases is going to be important as well. LSWS can only do so much. Right now I believe the sysadmin is using caching to bring down the load even further. I wonder, though, if there aren’t basic differences between your forum and the one in the case study. Perhaps a larger number of users online at one time? Or maybe he has plugins that he has decided he can’t live without (and has decided to deal with the extra load those plugins cause)? I’ll let the sysadmin know and maybe he can shed some light on this.
m
PS January 1st, 2014
What puzzles me is that how can such a forum still do loads near 10 with Litespeed(!) I run a slightly bigger forum (4-CPU Litespeed Enterprise with older vBulletin/Sphinx, no caching) and load is now less than 1 with 2-3000 people in (an 8 core server), never got over 3 even on a much worse server with untrimmed SSD’s. Yes, I definitely got much much worse loads with Apache, but fact is that optimizing software/db is equally important to getting Litespeed if you want loads closer to 1. Just my 5 cents, carry on 🙂
Alfa1 December 20th, 2013
Is there any chance on a Varnish plugin like there is for vbulletin? That really makes a world of difference for vbulletin.
Frank December 10th, 2013
In your previous case study you referenced WordPress. I’d be interested in seeing the results on a community based site such as a vBulletin, BBPress or BuddyPress environment.
- Michael December 11th, 2013
  Howdy,
  We can definitely look into it. This XenForo case study is one step in that (the community-based site) direction. vBulletin I imagine I can find. (It may be more of a “LiteSpeed handles so much traffic for this vB site” article and not a “Check out this dramatic change” article. It’s hard to get case studies with graphs of people as they’re changing. It’s easier to find people who have been using us for a little while and want to share their stories.) I’m not so sure about finding a BBPress or BuddyPress story, but I’ll definitely look.
  Cheers,
  Michael