OpenLiteSpeed 1.4 Adds Lua, RCS, Plain Text Config, and Shared Memory Support!

OpenLiteSpeed version 1.4 was released last Friday with a number of new features to improve stability, functionality, and performance:

Lua

Lua is a mature, fast, powerful, lightweight scripting language. It is used in many arenas and is now the leading scripting language for games. (It’s been used for both World of Warcraft and Angry Birds, for example.) Lua is known for being fast and OpenLiteSpeed makes it even faster by using the LuaJIT just-in-time compiler. We’re looking forward to the new wonders OpenLiteSpeed users (and LSWS Enterprise users, in the future) will be able to serve.

Shared Memory

OpenLiteSpeed 1.4 is able to make use of shared memory, allowing multiple processes to access data stored in RAM. This allows for effective caching between processes with rapid data retrieval from that cache. We’re using it right now to speed up SSL by enabling SSL session reuse, as well as enabling multiple Lua instances to share data. We will be adding more controls for how this shared memory cache is used in future versions.

Revision Control System

In version 1.4, we’ve added integration with Revision Control System (RCS). OpenLiteSpeed will now automatically log all configuration changes in RCS files every time you restart. This makes it easy to revert to an old setup if you do something that maybe you shouldn’t have. We have a quick guide for using RCS with OpenLiteSpeed in our wiki. Full documentation for RCS is available from GNU.

Shift to Plain Text Configurations

Starting with version 1.4, OpenLiteSpeed will only support plain text configurations (sometimes referred to by us as “plain conf”). The plain text config files are advantageous because they are more fault-tolerant. If you make an error when editing an XML configuration file directly, it is possible to bring down the whole system. With plain text configuration files, any invalid configurations are simply ignored. XML is a great system if you are making all edits through the GUI, but, with so many users editing configuration files directly, it seemed best to take out this point of failure.

Installing OpenLiteSpeed 1.4 in the same location as your current OpenLiteSpeed installation will automatically convert your config files to plain text. OpenLiteSpeed will also automatically back up your XML configurations with .migrated.time_stamp added to the file name. If you downgrade to another version below 1.4, you can migrate your configuration files back to XML using the recover_xml.sh script we have added.

Beta for Now

Because we’ve added so many new features, OpenLiteSpeed 1.4 is currently designated beta. We encourage all users who have a chance to try it — this will help us get the features stable faster — but this is not a stable version.

OpenLiteSpeed 1.3.x, on the other hand, is very close to being declared stable. Please let us know if you have any bugs (in either version), so we can get them fixed.