LiteSpeed Web Server 5.0 Release Candidate 2: More Stable, Virtual Host-Level Bandwidth Throttling

We are very proud to announce the release of LSWS 5.0 RC2. RC2 fixes all known bugs with LSWS 5.0 RC1 and adds vhost-level bandwidth throttling (as well as other minor functionality).

Virtual Host-Level Bandwidth Throttling

For LSWS 5.0, we have added vhost-level bandwidth throttling. This is an extension of our current Per Client Throttling settings, which allow you to control the amount of stress a single IP can put on your server. These settings are one of our most popular features because of the ways they mitigate DoS attacks. Our new vhost-level settings will allow you to customize bandwidth throttling, in Apache configs, for particular virtual hosts. This allows you to set up stricter settings for sites that you know are targets or more lenient settings for sites that might require a lot of bandwidth going to one IP. (This has been available for some time in vhosts with LSWS-native configs.) It also allows for throttling bandwidth by file type and size.

Our implementation of this bandwidth throttling follows the syntax used by Apache’s mod_bw. Bandwidth throttling directives can only be placed in virtual host configuration file, not an .htaccess file. Some example settings would include:

BandWidth all 102400

This would limit the total bandwidth allowed to this virtual host to 100KB/s.

BandWidth all 50000
MinBandWidth all -1

This limits each client to 50KB/s with no maximum total bandwidth.

LargeFileLimit .avi 500 10240

This limits AVI files over 500KB to 10KB/s bandwidth to prevent large video files from hogging your bandwidth.

Other directives are not supported. We will have detailed documentation for this feature in our wiki soon. Update: Our guide to vhost-level bandwidth throttling can be found here.

More Stability

This release is a big step on the way to releasing a stable LSWS 5.0. There are a lot of highly anticipated features going into this release:

• SPDY/3.1 and 3.0 support
• ESI support
• WebSocket proxying
• Virtual host-level bandwidth throttling
• A myriad of new Apache settings supported

We request all users who can to please give LSWS 5.0 RC2 a try. The more users who try it, the faster we can get it stable.