Improving DigitalOcean WordPress Droplet Performance with just One Click (With OpenLiteSpeed)!

DigitalOcean-WP-Droplet-1

LiteSpeed Technologies announces the release of a one-click script that quickly and easily supercharges your DigitalOcean Droplet’s WordPress setup. LiteSpeed’s cache performance delivers significant performance and scalability gains over the DigitalOcean default.

DigitalOcean’s default WordPress droplet relies on Apache Web Server and does not utilize a cache. We improve upon this by replacing Apache with OpenLiteSpeed Web Server and add LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress to further accelerate your WordPress site.

OpenLiteSpeed is our high-performance, lightweight, open source HTTP server that outperforms Apache Web Server by a wide margin. By working directly with OpenLiteSpeed, the LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress plugin statically caches your dynamic WordPress pages, greatly reducing page load times and server load. Additionally, the LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress plugin provides superior control and flexibility over your cache when compared to other WordPress cache plugins.

Both OpenLiteSpeed and the LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress plugin are free and open source.

When compared to the default droplet, benchmarks show that our solution offers a performance increase of 10x and even more as the load increases. When compared to a DigitalOcean 1-Click Droplet modified to include WP Super Cache, our solution still handles around 2x the requests per second at less than 1/100 of the server load.

DOWPfinal

The above graph was made using 10,000 total request results with the exception of the one concurrency case, which was graphed using the 1,000 total request results.

Larger sites with higher concurrent visitors will see the most benefit, however even small sites should see a performance boost of 3-4x.

Our benchmarks were done using ab to simulate up to 100 users hitting the WordPress home page (with its sample hello world post) at a time. They were performed on a 1GB 1 Core Droplet.

Currently our DigitalOcean WordPress script is only compatible with Ubuntu 14 based DigitalOcean 1-click WordPress Droplets. This script will install OpenLiteSpeed, lsphp56 and its components, and the LSCache for WordPress plugin for your droplet.

Simply run the script as a superuser (sudo can also be used) with the upgrade flag to quickly and easily install and set up OpenLiteSpeed with lsphp56:

bash <(curl http://www.litespeedtech.com/packages/tools/convert-dowp-to-ols.sh) upgrade

Or use the upgrade70 flag to use lsphp70.

bash <(curl http://www.litespeedtech.com/packages/tools/convert-dowp-to-ols.sh) upgrade70

This command will install OpenLiteSpeed to the /usr/local/lsws directory and use your existing WordPress installation in /var/www/html.

Increasing your DigitalOcean WordPress performance has never been easier!

For more info, check out our DOWP Droplet Upgrade wiki page.

The Raw Data

Concurrency Total Requests Default Droplet OpenLiteSpeed + LSCache for WordPress Default Droplet with WP Super Cache
1 100 17 285 177
1 1,000 17 258 175
10 1,000 20 949 581
10 10,000 20 983 511
20 1,000 20 1053 655
20 10,000 20 1046 550
50 1,000 18 1056 617
50 10,000 18 1057 592
100 10,000 18* 1058 539
100 100,000 20* 1054 651
*Concurrency 100 tests run on the default droplet were done with a total of 1,000 requests.

We also measured server load during a 100 concurrency tests with 100,000 total requests:

Server + Cache Duration Server Load Req/Sec
OLS + LSCache for WordPress 95 seconds 0.35-0.4 1052
Default + WP Super Cache 209 seconds ~130 480

Comments

12 responses to “Improving DigitalOcean WordPress Droplet Performance with just One Click (With OpenLiteSpeed)!”

  1. David Turner Avatar

    This appears to have all kinds of errors. When should we expect an update?

    Thank you.

    1. Michael Alegre Avatar
      Michael Alegre

      Hello David,

      What kind of errors are you running into?

      Regards,
      -Michael

  2. Francesco Avatar
    Francesco

    I want also point out this error:

    WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
    openlitespeed
    E: There were unauthenticated packages and -y was used without –allow-unauthenticated
    chown: cannot access ‘/usr/local/lsws/autoupdate’: No such file or directory
    chown: cannot access ‘/usr/local/lsws/cachedata’: No such file or directory
    chown: cannot access ‘/usr/local/lsws/tmp/ocspcache’: No such file or directory

  3. Francesco Avatar
    Francesco

    The script it’s not working. Is it still supported?

    I got this error:

    Warning: Failed to create directory ‘/root/.wp-cli/cache/’: mkdir(): Permission denied.

    When I try to access http://MY-IP:7080 I got a connection timeout. However it seeems that litespeed it’s not installed at all

    1. Jon Avatar
      Jon

      Please try running the command again, we fixed a couple issues with it.

      1. Francesco Avatar
        Francesco

        Too late. I’ve installed it manually. However I will give it a try on next project. Thanks

  4. Scott Avatar
    Scott

    Any support for ServerPilot?

    1. Lisa Clarke Avatar
      Lisa Clarke

      No, I’m sorry. The only control panel that can currently be used with OpenLiteSpeed is CyberPanel.

  5. Pedro DIAS Avatar
    Pedro DIAS

    After doing this, my site crash. Can’t trace any errors in the logs. Is there a way to reverse this installation?

    1. Jonathan Kagan Avatar
      Jonathan Kagan

      Please open a support ticket with us by emailing support@litespeedtech.com

  6. Ali Youssef Avatar

    can you provide script to upgrade ubuntu 18.04 plz??

    1. Eric Avatar
      Eric

      Hi,

      You can check some articles e.g. https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-upgrade-ubuntu-16-04-to-18-04-lts-using-terminal/ to upgrade ubuntu 18. Please make sure your site has LSPHP7.x installed and supported.

      If you don’t want to upgrade, you can launched a new OpenLiteSpeed WordPress server from DigitalOcean Marketplace and migrate your site to the new launched server.

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