OpenLiteSpeed Supports HTTP/2 Draft 16

We’re gearing up for the impending release of HTTP/2. To prepare, we’ve already got HTTP/2 draft 16 support in both OpenLiteSpeed 1.3.7 and 1.4.4.

The Next Step to a Faster Internet

In case you haven’t heard, HTTP/2 contains a number of advances that will allow Internet traffic to move faster than ever:

• Binary protocol instead of textual – more efficient and less error prone
• Fully multiplexed – allows multiple requests and responses over a single TCP connection
• Header compression – reduces overhead
• Server push – allows server to push resources to the client instead of requiring the client to request them first

OpenLiteSpeed now supports all the above features except server push. (We do not anticipate widespread use of server push anytime soon.) HTTP/2 support is in development for LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise and will be available in the LSWS 5.0 official release.

Ready for Production Use

Best of all, OpenLiteSpeed is not some niche, experimental web server. OpenLiteSpeed is a full-featured HTTP server. The 1.3.x branch is stable and we already have many users running it on production sites.

For the past two years, LiteSpeed Technologies has been following HTTP/2’s development by supporting all new versions of SPDY. Because of this preparation, we believe that OpenLiteSpeed’s HTTP/2 support is ready for widespread use.

And, because of the great number of situations it can be used for, OpenLiteSpeed’s implementation of HTTP/2 may be the most far-reaching server-side support of HTTP/2 yet. (On the client side, FireFox, and IE also support drafts of HTTP/2, and Chrome has announced support starting very soon.)

If you’re as excited as we are for the Internet’s next level, download a copy of OpenLiteSpeed and start moving the Internet forward.