LiteSpeed Technologies
LiteSpeed Web Server is Event-Driven https://www.litespeedtech.com/images/logos/litespeed/litespeed-logo.png 2019-12-13 16:59:00 LiteSpeed Web Server's event-driven architecture vs. Apache's process-based: Fewer processes means less overhead, more connections, and no hardware upgrade required.

Event-Driven vs. Process-Based Web Servers

Fewer processes means less overhead and more connections with no hardware upgrade required

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The Event-Driven Advantage

The biggest difference between LiteSpeed Web Server and Apache is in the way that they handle connections: LiteSpeed Web Server utilizes an event-driven architecture and Apache is process-based.

  • Apache creates a new process or thread for every connection. This is a model which requires a lot of overhead.
  • LiteSpeed Web Server, with its event-driven architecture, serves all connections with few processes, saving resources.
  • This efficient method allows you to serve significantly more connections, faster, and without upgrading your hardware.

A Detailed Discussion of Event-Driven vs. Process-Based Servers

more overhead

Process-Based = Exponentially More Overhead

LiteSpeed Web Server and Apache are built upon different architectures. Apache comes from an older breed of process-based servers. In essence, Apache starts a new process (or thread) to handle every connection it gets. More connections means more threads. For every connection that requires PHP, Apache must start a new PHP process, increasing memory usage exponentially. As the number of connections rises, so does the burden on your Apache server. Access to your site slows down, and visitors leave, deciding it's not worth it to wait for your pages to load.

light weight and efficient

Event-Driven = Lightweight and Efficient

The antidote to all of this is an event-driven architecture. LiteSpeed handles all the connections it gets with one process (or, in some cases, very few processes). This one process stays open and handles all events that pop up — new requests coming in and new dynamic responses ready to go out. LiteSpeed Web Server concerns itself not with creating new processes to handle every aspect of every connection, but with reacting to events that occur.

all types of content

A Clear Advantage for all Types of Content

For static content (like images, CSS, HTML), the advantage is obvious: instead of consuming the overhead required for a new process for each request, LiteSpeed's event-driven model employs its one process to handle the requests as they come in. This is faster and consumes significantly less CPU and memory than Apache.

For web applications (like PHP) and database processes (like MySQL), the interaction is complex, but is still far more efficient than a process-based model:

  • LiteSpeed Web Server fields requests and forwards them to external processes.
  • LiteSpeed does not wait around for the dynamic responses, but instead continues to field more requests (both static and dynamic)
  • When an external process response is ready, LiteSpeed Web Server gets a callback (a new event to which it must react)
  • LiteSpeed sends the external response back to the requesting client.

During all of this, LSAPI, LiteSpeed's server API, keeps control over the number of processes being created for web applications, and reuses them wherever possible, further increasing CPU and memory efficiency.

low cpu usage

Consistently Low CPU Usage in Heavy Traffic

When dealing with tens of thousands of concurrent connections, would you rather field the requests and responses with a few processes? Or would you rather create a separate process for every one of those connections? The answer is clear. An event-driven server's CPU and memory usage do rise under heavy traffic conditions, but not exponentially like they do with Apache's process-based server. An event-driven model allows for faster content delivery because the server skips the overhead of creating new processes and has more memory left for handling database and external applications. Most importantly, it allows for consistently low CPU (load) and memory usage, even during traffic spikes or DDoS attacks.

Coffee Making

Coffee Making - The Coffee Shop Analogy

  • process based

    The Process-Based Coffee Shop

    Each employee serves one customer; They take the customer's order, fill it, and take payment.

    This is fine if you have a small number of customers or very simple orders like coffee and doughnuts. But what happens when there is a packed house full of customers, each of whom is ordering a complicated drink (venti mocha, two Splenda, half 2%, half soy...)?
    If each of your employees has to take one order, fill the order, and take payment, before they can serve the next customer, you will need a lot of employees and a very, very big shop! Otherwise, potential customers will be frustrated with the wait, and they will leave.
    This is how many hosts deal with more traffic: they just buy lots and lots of hardware.
  • event based

    The Event-Based Coffee Shop

    One employee takes the orders and delegates them to other employees to fill.

    The ideal solution is to make your employees event-driven: to have one person take the orders and have other people in the background filling those orders. The person taking the orders is concerned only with relaying instructions to the baristas on the backend. In this way, one person can do the work of many. You don't need extra counter space, or many people taking orders.
    This solution scales well. You save money on retail space and wages, and your customers get their fancy coffees more quickly.
    In the same way, LiteSpeed Web Server saves you money on hardware and support by requiring less CPU and less memory, and making your servers run more smoothly.
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Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Effective Date: January 09, 2023

LiteSpeed Technologies, Inc. (aka “LiteSpeed”) is committed to protecting your privacy. This policy ("Privacy Policy" or "Policy") explains our practices for our site, www.litespeedtech.com ("Site"). You can visit most pages of the Site without giving us any information about yourself, but sometimes we do need information to provide services that you request. By using this Site or any products or services provided through the Site, you expressly consent to the use and disclosure of information as described in this Privacy Policy.

LiteSpeed reserves the right to revise, modify, add, or remove provisions to this Privacy Policy at any time. If we make changes to this Privacy Policy, we will update the Effective Date to note the date of such changes. LiteSpeed encourages you to review this Privacy Policy periodically for any changes. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE WITH ANY OF THE TERMS BELOW, YOU SHOULD NOT USE THIS SITE OR THE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES OFFERED BY LITESPEED TECHNOLOGIES AT THIS SITE.

Collection of Information

Personal Information.

LiteSpeed will ask you for certain “Personal Information” when you complete registration or product information request forms on the Site, including but not limited to your name, address, telephone number, email address, and credit card information. You can always choose not to provide us with the requested information, however, you may not be able to complete the transaction or use our products or services if you do not provide the information requested.

Non-Personal Information.

LiteSpeed may collect non-personally identifiable information from you such as the type of browser you use, your operating system, the screen resolution of your browser, your ISP, your IP address, which pages you view on the Site and the time and duration of your visits to the Site (collectively, “Non-Personal Information”). LiteSpeed may associate Non-Personal Information with Personal Information if you register with the Site.

User Communications.

If you communicate with us, we may collect information relating to that communication whether it takes the form of email, fax, letter, forum posting, blog comments, testimonials or any other form of communication between you and LiteSpeed or Submitted by you to the Site (collectively, “User Communications”).

Server Information.

If you use one of our software products such as LiteSpeed Web Server or LiteSpeed Web ADC, we may collect certain information concerning such software and concerning the server upon which the software operates. This information includes: (a) the licensed or unlicensed status of the software; (b) the source from which the license for the software was obtained (i.e., LiteSpeed or a LiteSpeed affiliate); or (c) information about the server upon which the software is installed including (i) the public IP address, (ii) the operating system and (iii) the use of any virtualization technologies on such server ((a) through (c) collectively, “Server Information”). Additionally, “Server Information” may also include information collected from you by LiteSpeed in the event that you request technical support services including without limitation, IP addresses, usernames, and passwords necessary to login to SSH, the root directory of the server upon which you installed the LiteSpeed software and any affected accounts including email accounts, control panel accounts, MySQL accounts, CMS accounts and other accounts.

Use and Storage of Collected Information

LiteSpeed may use Personal Information to create and authenticate your account, to respond to your requests, to provide you with customer and technical support, or to provide you with information regarding our products, services, partners, and company. You may update your Personal Information with us at any time, but we may maintain records of any Personal Information you disclose to us indefinitely, unless otherwise requested as outlined below.

We may use User Communications in the same ways we use Personal Information. If you communicate with us for a particular purpose, we may use your User Communications for that purpose. For example, if you contact us for technical support, we may use your communications to provide technical support to you. We may maintain records of User Communications you transmit to us indefinitely, unless otherwise requested as outlined below.

LiteSpeed may use Non-Personal Information to maintain, evaluate, improve and provide our Site, the Services and any other LiteSpeed products and services. We may retain Non-Personal Information indefinitely.

We may use Server Information to provide you with technical support services and to maintain, evaluate, improve and provide LiteSpeed products and services. We may also use such information to investigate unlicensed (and therefore unauthorized) uses of our software. LiteSpeed may maintain Server Information indefinitely, with the exception of usernames, passwords, and other login information given in connection with support service requests. Such login information will be purged when the ticket is closed.

Disclosure of Collected Information

LiteSpeed will only disclose Personal Information to third parties if acting under a good faith belief that such action is necessary, including but not limited to: (a) to resolve disputes, investigate problems, or comply with laws or regulations; (b) to enforce our Terms of Service; (c) to protect and defend the rights, property, or safety of our company or our users; or (d) in the event of a merger, acquisition or sale of all or substantially all LiteSpeed assets. Other than this limited activity, we do not share, sell, or rent any personal information to third parties.

You will receive notice in the form of modifications to this Policy when information about you might go to third parties other than as described in this Policy, and you always have the opportunity to contact us as set forth below if you do not wish your information to go to third parties.

LiteSpeed cannot be responsible for protecting your information if you share such information in publicly available sections of the Site such as the user forums, blog comments, or testimonials section. You should use your own judgment in disclosing this information on the Site.

Use of Cookies

“Cookies” are small pieces of information that your browser stores on your computer on behalf of a website that you have visited. Cookies may be used in order to complete transactions on our site. You can always choose not to accept cookies with the settings of your web browser, however, you may not be able to complete these transactions if you do not accept cookies.

Security of Personal Information

We use reasonable security methods to protect your personal information from unauthorized access, use or disclosure. No data transmission over the Internet or any wireless network can be guaranteed to be perfectly secure. While we try to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk.

LiteSpeed uses industry-standard SSL-encryption to protect sensitive data.

In the event that LiteSpeed becomes aware of a security breach, unauthorized disclosure or inadvertent disclosure concerning your information, you agree that LiteSpeed may notify you of such an event using the Personal Information previously provided.

You are responsible for maintaining your account’s security.

GDPR Notice and your Rights as Data Subject

For the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation (the “GDPR”), in the European Union, LiteSpeed Technologies Inc. is a “data controller” of the Personal Information you provide to us for the primary purposes of providing you or your customers with our services.

For our customers and users in the European Union, by clicking the "I Accept" button or otherwise accepting the terms and conditions of our services through a clickable action or similar action, you hereby acknowledge, agree and unequivocally consent to the collection, processing, management, treatment, transfer and authorization of your Personal Information by LiteSpeed Technologies and/or its affiliates, clients, sub-processors and/or authorized third parties.

If you are a resident of Switzerland, the contact details for the data protection authorities are available here:
https://www.edoeb.admin.ch/edoeb/en/home.html.

For European Union (EU) customers, please be reminded that the EU has not found the United States and some other countries to have an adequate level of protection of Personal Information under Article 45 of the GDPR.

The sections here below cover certain situations that you, as data subject, and we as a data controller, are most likely to encounter; but you should also carefully review the full list of data subject rights here: https://www.gdpr-info.eu/chapter-3/.

  • Right to be Forgotten: You can request us to be “forgotten”; that is, to have your entire Personal Information removed from our service. If we are asked to do this, in accordance with Article 17 GDPR we will remove any Personal Information that we have collected from you as requester. We will also need to contact any third parties that process your Personal Information on our behalf, such as our cloud service providers using the adequate mechanisms. To ensure that any personal data in LiteSpeed Technologies’ possession can be removed in a timely manner, you can relay any request to be “forgotten” to us by submitting a request.
  • Right to Data Portability: In accordance with Article 20 GDPR our users located in the EU may request LiteSpeed Technologies to send them any Personal Information in our possession. In this case, we will provide you with any Personal Information that you have in a commonly used, machine-readable format.
  • Right to Data Access: As a data subject, in accordance with Article 15 GDPR you can ask LiteSpeed Technologies to confirm how and where your Personal Information is being stored and processed. You also have the right to know how such data is shared with third parties by us.
  • Right to Data Rectification: As a data subject, in accordance with Article 16 GDPR you have the right to obtain from LiteSpeed Technologies, without undue delay, the rectification of inaccurate Personal Information concerning you.
  • Right to be Informed: You have the right to be informed about the Personal Information we collect from you, and how we process it.
  • Right to Withdraw Consent: In accordance with Article 7(3) GDPR, you have the right to withdraw your consent given to us at any time.
  • Right to Object: In accordance with Article 18 GDPR you have the right to object to us processing your Personal Information for the following reasons:
    • Processing was not based on legitimate interests or the performance of a task in the public interest/exercise of official authority (including profiling);
    • Direct marketing (including profiling);
    • Processing for purposes of scientific/historical research and statistics; and
    • Rights in relation to automated decision-making and profiling.
  • Automated Individual Decision-Making and Profiling: You have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning you or similarly significantly affects you.
  • Right to Complain: You have the right to file a complaint with supervisory authorities if your information has not been processed in compliance with the GDPR. Furthermore, in accordance with Article 77 GDPR, if the supervisory authorities fail to address your complaint properly, you may have the right to a judicial remedy.

Privacy Requests

Lastly, you retain the right to access, amend, correct or delete your Personal Information where it is inaccurate at any time. To do so, please contact us as indicated in the Contact Us section. We reserve the right to charge a reasonable fee, as permitted by applicable laws and regulations, in order to comply with complex requests or repetitive requests from individual users.

Your privacy request must include, at the least, the following information: (i) your complete name, address and/or e-mail address in order for us to notify you of the response to your request; (ii) attached documents establishing your identity; and (iii) a clear and concise description of the Personal Information with regard to which you seek to enforce any of your privacy rights. If you request rectification, please indicate amendments to be made and attach documentation to back up your request.

Upon receipt of your privacy request, and after due review, we may then edit, deactivate and/or delete your Personal Information from our services for the maximum term allowed by the GDPR for each applicable case. In case of secure databases under our control where deletion is impossible, we will make such information permanently inaccessible.

Notice to California Residents

Pursuant to the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (the “CCPA”), LiteSpeed Technologies and/or its affiliates, clients, sub-processors and/or authorized third parties hereto provide the following Privacy Policy notice regarding the categories of Personal Information that we may collect and/or disclose within the preceding twelve (12) months regarding California residents who are not employees, independent contractors, owners, directors, officers, or job applicants of LiteSpeed Technologies, or emergency contacts or benefits beneficiaries of the foregoing.

Thenceforth, the CCPA provides Californians with the following rights:

  • Requests for Information: you (or your authorized agent) can request a copy of your Personal Information, including how we have collected, used, and shared your Personal Information over the past 12 months (if any), including the categories of Personal Information we collected and our purposes for doing so; the categories of sources for that information; the categories of third parties with whom we shared it for a business purpose and our purposes for doing so.
  • Your Right to Notification: under the CCPA, we cannot collect new categories of Personal Information or use them for materially different purposes without first notifying you.
  • Nondiscrimination for exercising your CCPA Rights: the CCPA prohibits us from discriminating against you for exercising your rights under the law. Such discrimination may include denying services, charging different prices or rates for services, providing a different level or quality of services, or suggesting that you will receive a different level or quality of goods or services as a result of exercising your rights.
  • Your Right to Delete Personal Information: you can request that we delete your Personal Information by contacting us. You also can request that we delete specific information, and we will honor such requests, unless a due exception applies, such as when the information is necessary to complete a transaction, verify a fraud, review a chargeback or contract for which it was collected or when it is being used to detect, prevent, or investigate security incidents, comply with laws, identify and repair bugs or ensure another consumer’s ability to exercise their free speech rights or other rights provided by law.

    • Please take into consideration that we may deny your deletion request if retaining the Personal Information is necessary for us, our affiliates or our service providers in order to:

      • Complete the transaction for which we collected the Personal Information, provide a good or service that you requested, take actions reasonably anticipated within the context of our ongoing business relationship with you, or otherwise perform our contract with you;
      • Detect security incidents, protect against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity, or prosecute those responsible for such activities;
      • Debug our products to identify and repair errors that impair existing intended functionality;
      • Exercise free speech, ensure the right of another consumer to exercise their free speech rights, or exercise another right provided for by law;
      • Comply with the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (Cal. Penal Code § 1546 seq.);
      • Enable solely internal uses that are reasonably aligned with consumer expectations based on your relationship with us;
      • Comply with a legal obligation that has substantive grounds;
      • Make other internal and lawful uses of that information that are compatible with the context in which you provided it.

Overall, we have, may or will collect the following categories of Personal Information from our users, customers and individuals, as necessary to fulfill our legal obligations and operational business purposes:

  • Personal information (as defined in the California Customer Records Law), such as contact information;
  • Identifiers, such as online identifier, IP address and name;
  • Internet or network activity information, such as browsing history and interactions with our and other websites and systems;
  • Geo-localization data, such as device location and IP location;
  • Audio, electronic, visual and similar information, such as video recordings and multimedia content created in connection with our business activities; and
  • Inferences drawn from any of the Personal Information listed above to create a profile or summary about, for example, an individual’s preferences and characteristics.

International Data Transfer Notice

LiteSpeed Technologies values your users’ privacy. Although our software does not directly collect any personally identifiable information from visitors to your site, LiteSpeed may still be considered a data processor in certain jurisdictions, as user information may be temporarily cached and/or logged, as outlined in this document.

We have our headquarters in the State of Pennsylvania, United States of America (USA). Henceforth, your Personal Information may be accessed by us or our affiliates, agents, partners and third-party service providers in the USA and our locations which may or may not be located in your country of residence, and you hereby consent to such access and transfer by simple disclosure.

Servers

LiteSpeed Web Server, OpenLiteSpeed, LiteSpeed Web ADC, and related software may record IP addresses as a part of normal logging. An access log and an error log may record visitor IP addresses and URL visited. The logs are stored locally on the system where LiteSpeed server software is installed and are not transferred to or accessed by LiteSpeed employees in any way, except as necessary in providing routine technical support if you request it. This logging may be turned off through configuration. It is up to individual server administrators to come up with their own schedule for removing such logs from the file system.

Cache Solutions

Our cache plugins potentially store a duplicate copy of every web page on display on your site. The pages are stored locally on the system where LiteSpeed server software is installed and are not transferred to or accessed by LiteSpeed employees in any way, except as necessary in providing routine technical support if you request it. All cache files are temporary, and may easily be purged before their natural expiration, if necessary, via a Purge All command. It is up to individual site administrators to come up with their own cache expiration rules.

LSCache for WordPress

In addition to caching, our WordPress plugin has an Image Optimization feature. When optimization is requested, images are transmitted to a remote LiteSpeed server, processed, and then transmitted back for use on your site. LiteSpeed keeps copies of optimized images for 7 days (in case of network stability issues) and then permanently deletes them.

Similarly, the WordPress plugin has a Reporting feature whereby a site owner can transmit an environment report to our server so that we may better provide technical support.

Neither of these features collects any visitor data. Only server and site data is involved.

Support Services

Sometimes, when you request technical support, LiteSpeed may ask for login credentials to various areas of your site. You may refuse to share such credentials, however refusal may impact LiteSpeed’s ability to provide the requested support services.

Upon completion of a support ticket, LiteSpeed immediately deletes all login credentials you may have shared.

Any user data encountered by LiteSpeed is kept strictly confidential. We never provide your support ticket information to any third party without your explicit consent.

Contact Us

If you would like to update information that you have voluntarily provided to us, stop receiving information from us, or exercise any of the rights granted to you under Privacy Laws, including the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, please e-mail info@litespeedtech.com.