Next steps on getting more performance with LiteSpeed webserver

As we said on a previous article, we were waiting for the last chapters on tunning our LiteSpeed webserver. Finnaly, yui-life.com's webmaster has published in two articles the steps to get a custom PHP5 with eAccelerator and some tips on tunning the webserver.

I have tested his solution and I can say I’m quite happy with it, indeed I was also sharing a FastCGI + APC accelerator for two other domains and at the end I have migrated all of them (five) to the LiteSpeed solution.

You can read the articles at the following links:

Litespeed on Dreamhost PS: Final Optimizations for Stability and Lowest Cost
Compiling PHP5 and eAccelerator for Litespeed on Dreamhost PS

I have only one problem using LiteSpeed Standard proxied behind Apache, and it’s related to some web applications (like WordPress 3.3.4) use the header $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] to get the visitors IP instead of $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'], so the recorded IP it’s your own VPS IP, as it’s the one who sent you the request. Remember, Apache’s mod_proxy has been previously configured to send you the traffic to a running port of your LiteSpeed server.

LiteSpeed Enterprise offers a feature to mask automatically that problem but for other web applications not so “good coded” you’ll have to patch them if you are able (some could be encoded).

In the case of WordPress, there is a ticket submitted at their tracking website to ask for this feature on future releases, but it has been a few months since the last update and no planned date for that.

In the same ticket, some developer called hovenko added the patch file to add that functionality. I tested it and right now I’m running with the modified version in the two blogs which run with LiteSpeed and it’s getting now the correct visitor IP.

Thanks Hovenko!