LiteSpeed Web Server v6.0

LiteSpeed Web Server v6.0 is now available! This important update provides significant gains in performance, security, and Apache compatibility, so let’s take a look!

What’s New in 6.0?

In v6.0, we tackled cache engine enhancements, Asynchronous ModSecurity, support for the new HTTP/3 v1, improved Apache compatibility, and so much more.

Cache Engine Enhancements

This update introduces a few enhancements to the LSCache Engine, including POST response caching, and improved PURGE/REFRESH by URL. We designed these enhancements to provide greater flexibility in managing your customized web application caches.

We go into a lot more detail in this blog post.

Asynchronous ModSecurity Engine

As of LiteSpeed Web Server v6.0, we have introduced a separate worker thread pool for ModSecurity processing. Now, when a request needs to be scanned, LSWS offloads it to the dedicated thread pool. There are numerous benefits to this. For example, not only does it improve performance, but it also adds one important feature: the ability to scan the response body without clogging the main event loop thread. We describe these benefits and others in more detail in this blog post.

HTTP/3 v1 Support

At long last, HTTP/3 is on the verge of becoming official. We have supported HTTP/3 and QUIC at every milestone along the way, and so we are ready to support v1 of the new protocol.

Apache Compatibility Improvements

ProxyPass

ProxyPass is a feature frequently used to facilitate cPanel’s Live Transfer feature. Live Transfer requires a domain name in the target URL, but until now, LiteSpeed Web Server could not meet this requirement. Previous versions required a manual external application configuration in order to work around a target URL with domain name, but this is no longer the case.

LSWS v6.0 supports external application configuration using a domain name for the target address. Now you can use Live Transfer to migrate LiteSpeed sites between servers with near zero downtime.

Version 6.0 has better support for websocket backends, too. Now secure wss:// connections are supported..

Conditional Configuration

One big change to Apache 2.4’s configuration is the addition of the <if><else> context to enable configurations based on the runtime evaluation of an expression.

For LiteSpeed to support this new configuration directive, we needed to make big changes. This is because LiteSpeed merges all of the various levels of configuration together one time, when a configuration is saved, in order to improve runtime performance. This method does not lend itself to runtime changes.

So, LSWS v6.0 includes the necessary changes to support conditional configuration.

Bubblewrap Support

Bubblewrap is a lightweight sandbox application by Flatpak, which implements Linux namespaces. Supporting Bubblewrap essentially gives LiteSpeed Web Server a full sandbox, including operating-system-supported isolated mounts, user/group IDs, interprocess communications, users, cgroups, host names and more.

Learn more about Bubblewrap and LiteSpeed in this blog post.

Cgroup resource throttling

In order to maintain compatibility with DirectAdmin’s new per-user resource throttling feature, LiteSpeed has added simple cgroup-based resource throttling through lscgid. Now, not only is it possible to control PHP processes, but you may throttle CGI scripts as well.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we encourage you to update to LiteSpeed Enterprise v6.0 today! It is available immediately, and you can get a full list of updates on our website. Still trying to make up your mind about LiteSpeed Web Server? Why not give our 15-day Trial License a try?