OpenLiteSpeed vs SlickStack Nginx

Ubuntu does use less RAM than CentOS but it will not make a big different for most stacks. And Red Hat hasn't said that CentOS is dead, although they caused a lot of confusion based on their lazy PR…

About Litespeed the gossip around forums like Reddit past few years claiming it is faster than Nginx is just marketing tactics:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/ndtx23/what_is_the_fastest_modern_wordpress_stack_now/

SlickStack appears to use Ubuntu. Centminmod uses CentOS. Litespeed is mostly for cPanel hosting, so that is often using either CentOS or CloudLinux, etc.

If you are going with Nginx (recommended) then Ubuntu would be the more user friendly OS with easy shell commands like apt install nginx

And the advantage with Nginx is built-in FastCGI caching which is extremely robust. SlickStack or Centminmod can optimize the settings automatically.

Hi,

I assume you are looking for a high-performance stack for a WordPress site, I'd recommend you give OpenLiteSpeed WordPress stack a try, it's set up with OpenLiteSpeed(open source project) and LSCache, and it can be launched from the marketplace easily.

If you are curious about the performance, I'd say it's around 5~7 times faster than the Nginx stack in static file benchmark testing.

Here's the command I used for the benchmark testing, feel free to let me know if you have any questions.

h2load -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' -n 10000 -c 100 -t 1 -T 5 -m 10 https://example.com/

If you need predefined security headers or Cloudflare auto-setup from the script, then you might want to give SlickStack a try, but otherwise, OpenLiteSpeed is a better choice.

@jogosyti writes:

If you are going with Nginx (recommended) then Ubuntu would be the more user friendly OS with easy shell commands like apt install nginx

Ubuntu is the downstream bastard child of Debian. Debian has all those same commands…and none of the Canonical phone-home spyware and endless motd shills to pay for support.

-- sw

there are now many threads about Litespeed vs Nginx and everytime the employees of Litespeed suddenly comment and says "Litespeed is 10x faster or maybe 20x faster and much better"

and they never provide any evidence about their testing. why?

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/pc9vii/nginx_slickstack_vs_open_litespeed_benchmarks/

NGINX benchmark =

"most what i saw is 50K to 80K (non-clustered) requests per second and 30% CPU load, course, this was 2 x Intel Xeon with HyperThreading enabled,………."

Litespeed guys now trashing SlickStack and saying it will only get 3000 request for each second… where is the evidence? SlickStack had FastCGI cache in Nginx so it should be 50,000 requests is possible???

don't believe any claims without the evidence.. Alexa Top 1000 websites using Nginx only, think about that why every high traffic Wordpress is using only Nginx web server

anyway what is better depending on what you want, do you love htaccess/Apache and cache plugins for WP or you want to use something more simple and lightweight (Nginx block) so try both

I'm glad that you ask for the details, please check https://forum.openlitespeed.org/threads/openlitespeed-wordpress-benchmark.5029/

If you could make the Nginx result from 3,000 to 50,000 req/s on the same machine(1GB RAM 1CPU VM), please share the config here or send a pull request to slickstack, I'll be more than happy to re-do the test.

lol nobody asked you for details, Litespeed is very dishonest… You benchmark Nginx and disabled FastCGI but enable LS Cache. That is so dishonest and everyone can see the Reddit links. If you want to benchmark Nginx then you must enable FastCGI Caching….

For WordPress high traffic, which OS is the best?
Do you prefer Litespeed, CMM, or Nginx, SlickStack? or..
And the most portable option and why?

IF you want high security and fastest server response (TTFB) then you should always choose Nginx. That can be SlickStack or Centminmod or any open source app that is using Nginx, EasyEngine also very popular if you prefer the Docker container

Litespeed of course is not portable because requires their own server, their own cache, their own LSPHP, their own WordPress plugin, etc

Nginx is very portable, can install on any Linux system and Nginx configuration is 99% same. SlickStack is only shell script (portable) and Centminmod also…. (no Dockers)

Anyone can say like Litespeed guys, example ==

Nginx is around 10x faster than Litespeed for static files, and around 20x faster than Litespeed for page response (TTFB).

Actually, YOU asked for evidence, which is why I replied.

I am not sure where you got the idea that FastCGI was disabled. It is enabled by default in the SlickStack configuration, which you can see in their github repo. I didn't change anything from the default.

I can see how you might find LS benchmark numbers to be too good to be true. But we have repeatedly invited those of you who are nginx experts to share your configurations with us. Nobody ever takes us up on it.

The invitation is still open anytime.

Best,
litespeed