Lucee + LiteSpeed Web Server?

Is Lucee compatible with LiteSpeed Web Server?

Lucee only needs a servlet container engine to run. Lucee doesn’t depend on a front end web server (e.g. IIS, Apache2, NGNIX, LiteSpeed, etc). You can even run Lucee without a web server in front. So, you should be able to run it as long as the web server supports connecting it to the running servlet container engine.

If running a servlet container (which can be Lucee.jar but also other servlet containers) with Tomcat you need at least to be able to configure certain things on that web server (e.g. add custom headers ) in order to have certain functionality with reverse proxy. Or you run it with AJP. I’ve read that LiteSpeed supports AJP. But I don’t know how smooth it runs. However, any connection issue that may appear is because of the connectors not working well together, but not because of Lucee.

I’ve found this thread about a openlitespeed installation, but that won’t help much. If nobody chimes in here I’d look deeper in the liteSpeed forums as well, because this is about the general dynamic content connections.

As you deduced, I meant LiteSpeed Web Server and I have now edited my text. I currently run Lucee behind Apache2 via mod_cfml and I have read that LiteSpeed is a drop-in replacement for Apache and even officially supported by cPanel, so theoretically everything should continue to function after the switch, but I’ve heard such promises many times before with mixed results. I haven’t found much about LiteSpeed + Lucee which is why I’m inquiring here.

Hi @kenricashe,

When it comes down to which web server you are running, it comes down to what you are hosting.

Light speed has a faster and cleaner stack when it comes to http3, which is still experimental but when it comes to broti support or scaling, its sub par at best.

Typically ColdFusion plus some front end server, the front end server is for static content manipulation leaving the ColdFusion application server to run code.

You can do what you like with it, but lightspeed is a niche for smaller WordPress blogs for people who do not know how to performance tune apache, their network architecture, the application and so on.

Unlike Apache and like NGINX, LiteSpeed has an event-driven architecture which makes it substantially more than just a niche for WordPress blogs. I was hoping to run Node.js alongside my Lucee apps, both reverse proxied by NGINX, because Apache and Lucee are both unsuitable for Server-Sent Events. But my web host (Hostek) advised me that wouldn’t be supported in a cPanel environment. Then I hoped that LiteSpeed could be the solution for me to keep everything on a single VPS.

As for an answer to my original question, if anyone’s interested, I got that today also from Hostek, although this is again specific to a cPanel setup: “Lucee on cPanel with LiteSpeed isn’t something that our team will be able to support as this is a configuration that we’re not familiar with. We’ve attempted to utilize LiteSpeed with a cPanel Lucee server in the past but found that adding the CFML parsing as an extension in LiteSpeed broke the CFML requests.”

This means that LiteSpeed is not a 100% drop-in replacement for Apache. Ha, that doesn’t surprise me!

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Just an FYI:

apache_mpm_event is what you would want
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/mod/event.html

As for your host, You might find it hard to find any cpanel Host to fully support lightspeed.

My take though, and its always with every PROXY configuration. If you are running multiple application services, by port and then trying to glue it all together back to some normalized web port, why not just use an application gateway device and save yourself the overhead of trying to proxy something, further tying up IO and memory when the whole point was speed.

@Terry_Whitney, LiteSpeed Web Server is fully supported by Hostek as it is fully supported by cPanel, just not when Lucee is in the mix.

My primary goal instead of speed is to support up to 400 concurrent Server-Sent Events connections, but if speed was my objective, both NGINX and LiteSpeed accomplish that via caching, so they are more than just proxies. I know caching can be accomplished with Apache via mod_cache, and yet all the benchmarks I’ve seen indicate NGINX and LiteSpeed are far ahead when it comes to caching.

I’m wary of too many experimental changes and I have zero experience with application gateway devices. I prefer to stick with Hostek as they are the only pre-configured out-of-the-box Lucee VPS host I know of and their tech support – especially their in depth Lucee knowledge – has been fantastic. I’ve been a customer since 2015. I also like cPanel, and cPanel (for now) requires Apache (or LiteSpeed drop-in).

I did already install Apache’s MPM event module when I upgraded my server to HTTP/2.

I also increased MaxRequestWorkers from the default 150 to 600.

But when I load tested using loader.io, both Lucee admin’s resource monitor and my website stopped responding somewhere between 150-250 concurrent SSE connections.

So maybe it’s just Lucee that isn’t suited for SSE, as I was advised in my previous topic here.

However, if you have a solution to share there, please do! :smiley:

Just for posterity in case anyone else is trying to achieve a LiteSpeed + Lucee server, I managed to achieve this yesterday after trying in spare time over the months.

The setup works with either a “OpenLiteSpeed WP” image (i.e. host one site out of the box) or a “CyberPanel” image (i.e. host multiple sites out of the box).

• The solution requires a quick server.xml reconfig to set the base path to match the webroot logic of OLS/CyberPanel.

• Then setup an OLS proxy to TomCat on port 8888.

• Use .htaccess [P] rules to forward .cfm requests to TomCat for processing.

• With another RewriteRule, you can exposed Lucee’s server.cfm admin too.

• This doesn’t need the Apache connector to be installed (nor mod_cfml).

• This setup supports output buffering, i.e./e.g. CFFLUSH works.

• No known limitations so far expect absence of site-based (web.cfm) admin access support, which can easily be fixed by manual additional reconfig of server.xml and .htaccess rules.

I’m posting for posterity as I’ve scoured these forums for hours and hours and would have paid $$$ for a confirmed setup blueprint like the above 6m ago.

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4 posts were split to a new topic: Setup Lucee with OPS ) LiteSpeed)