Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/LiteSpeed Web Server

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. (non-admin closure) Winged Blades of Godric^{On leave} 08:57, 8 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

LiteSpeed Web Server (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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Claims to be the 4th most popular web server, but I can't actually find any WP:RS which talk about it. You would think that a web server which supposedly drives 2.9% of the sites on the internet would have tons of stuff written about it. The fact that I can find so little leads me to believe that the reported statistics are dubious. My guess is that most of the sites which use this are parked domains and things like that (but that's just speculation). Lots of mentions in hosting provider how-to documents, but that's not what we need. See also Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/OpenLiteSpeed. -- RoySmith (talk) 13:04, 13 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Internet-related deletion discussions. MassiveYR ♠ 13:13, 13 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Software-related deletion discussions. MassiveYR ♠ 13:13, 13 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete – I feel pretty stupid since I've been attempting to maintain this article without actually looking into detail about its notability, but in any case... the software appears to be used almost exclusively by large, commercial web hosting services, and as such there are very little WP:RS that even mention it; any articles about LSWS are apparently published by companies who use the software themselves, or are otherwise connected. So yes, the statistics are likely biased or fudged. Oh well. -- Pingumeister^(talk) 14:47, 13 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment: Hello, my name is Dmitri Tikhonov -- I am a programmer employed by LiteSpeed Technologies, the maker of the LiteSpeed Web Server. Obviously, I would like to see to it that this page not be deleted. In reply to the original criticism, the 2.9% figure comes from W3Techs, which is used as WP:RS in many Wikipedia articles. The position that W3Tech statistics are fudged has to be proved. Other than W3Techs, LiteSpeed Web Server is mentioned in NetCraft web server surveys from February and May of this year. Would you call NetCraft numbers biased? In regards to LiteSpeed Web Server usage: yes, we proudly serve the needs of our customers -- large, commercial web hosting providers. It does not make our software product less legitimate than Apache, Nginx, or IIS. I would like to be given an opportunity to improve this Wikipedia page to adhere to standards so that it is not deleted. I can look for, and include in the page, more -- or different -- WP:RS if that is what it takes. LiteSpeed Web Server is the fruit of many years of labor, of ingenuity and sweat of hardworking people. Please be fair to them. Dmitri tikhonov (talk) 03:05, 15 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• I am quite concerned here about the conflict of interest you pose, if you are willing to be a major contributor to the article. Please read the policy guideline here: WP:COI. Also, nobody is being unfair to the creators of the software. I am a software engineer myself, and I frequently work on software which I know does not meet the notability standard for Wikipedia. It's not about the quality of the article or the quality of the software in question. Please read the general notability guideline here: WP:GNG. As for the topic of the LightSpeed Technologies organization, there is a specific notability guideline for organizations here: WP:ORG. Please do not be offended that this article is being considered for deletion. Cheers, -- Pingumeister^(talk) 09:57, 15 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • (Also, for what it's worth, if you could actually find multiple WP:RS (and have them verified by other editors, due to your COI), it would make a strong case to keep the article. However, multiple people have tried and failed to find such sources.) -- Pingumeister^(talk) 09:59, 15 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree that I am biased; I do not try to hide it. I can promise to do my best to be objective when editing the article. However, I examined several pages similar to LiteSpeed Web Server and I see that when most of a Wikipedia article about a software product (a web server in particular) is written by the person(s) or company behind the product, it is flagged as a problem. This puts me in an interesting position: if I modify the article to adhere to the Wikipedia guidelines, I would be violating another set of Wikipedia guidelines... Would you, Pingumeister, be willing to make appropriate improvements, given the new references I provided below? You have already been maintaining this page (thank you!), could you perhaps continue? If not, how do you think I should proceed? Dmitri tikhonov (talk) 16:55, 16 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Regarding the stats, I didn't mean to imply that they were fraudulent. Perhaps my use of, dubious, was a poor choice of word. What I was trying to say was that usage stats alone do not meet our notability requirements. What we're looking for is coverage in third-party sources which talk about the program. That's what I'm not seeing. The gold standard would be articles in wide-circulation, general-interest publications (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc). Coverage in that tier isn't required, but, I'm not even finding coverage in the more specialized industry publications. It's those kinds of third-party reliable sources that we're looking for. I also work in the software world, and had never heard of this until I stumbled onto this article. The fact that I had never heard of it doesn't really mean anything, but it is what got me started doing a little research. -- RoySmith (talk) 12:34, 15 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete While I can certainly confirm that the software exists, I have to agree that I can't find anything to indicate notability under the general notability guidelines. Avram (talk) 05:32, 16 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment (I made this a separate comment because this is a large entry; if this is bad form, I can merge it under my original comment above.) I spent some time looking for reliable sources that would demonstrate LiteSpeed Web Server's notability and I found what I think are good references:

• A book on system administration by a major publisher recommends considering using LiteSpeed Web Server as one of Apache alternatives that are faster than Apache and use less memory. (The other alternatives listed are lighttpd and Zeus.)^[1]

I want to keep this article. I really do. A piece of software which runs 2.9% of the websites on the internet should be notable. But, our definition of notable is that there's good second-party sources which have written about it in depth. And, as much as I respect O'Reilly as a publisher, and as much as I want this to be notable, I just can't bring myself to accept that a reference like this counts for anything. It consists entirely of:

Once you reach the limits of your web server software, consider alternatives. In many cases, web servers such as lighttpd (http://www.lighttpd.net), Zeus (http://www. zeustech.net), and litespeed (http://litespeedtech.com) are faster than Apache and use less memory.

That's it. In a 162 page book, it's mentioned once, as part of a list. That meets WP:V, but not WP:N. Also, it's disingenuous to say they recommend using LiteSpeed, and mention the other two as other alternatives, when the other two are listed first and second, and LightSpeed is listed last. -- RoySmith (talk) 16:47, 30 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I think that it is disingenuous to say that what I say is disingenuous after misquoting me -- this is not what I wrote. The way I paraphrased the original text is fair. The reason I put LiteSpeed Web Server first in my list is because this is the topic we are discussing. I did not know I could just quote sources verbatim here: I chose to be on the safe side. Dmitri tikhonov (talk) 00:22, 4 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• A research paper presented three months ago at a conference of a major technical professional organization counts LiteSpeed Web Server in the list of six popular HTTP/2 implementations (the other five are Apache, H2O, nghttpd, Nginx, and Tengine). In this paper, the LiteSpeed implementation of HTTP/2 compares favorably to the others in several ways.^[2]

Unfortunately, I only have access to the abstract of that paper, not the full text. I assume from your comments that you have the full text. Could you give us a better idea of what the paper says regarding LiteSpeed? Perhaps some quotes? Could you tell us how, specifically, this paper evaluates these various servers and in what ways the paper says that it compares favorably to the others? The more specific and detailed you can be, the easier it will be for other people to evaluate this source. -- RoySmith (talk) 18:13, 30 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The paper evaluates HTTP/2 servers in terms of features, adherence to the protocol, and performance. Here are examples where LiteSpeed compares favorably:

1. Quote: Table IV lists seven servers that have been adopted by more than 1,000 sites in each experiment. We can see that Litespeed, Nginx and GSE are the most widely used web servers in both two (sic) experiments... This places LiteSpeed in the top (3 out of 7) HTTP/2 servers by share.
2. Quote: By sending unexpected WINDOW UPDATE frame, we find that Nginx and Tengine will ignore the zero window update whereas Litespeed and H2O will send back RST STREAM frame if the window is for stream as suggested by RFC 7540. LiteSpeed follows the spec, comparing favorably to those implementations that do not.
3. Quote: For LiteSpeed, 80% servers have HPACK compression ratios less than 0.3, indicating effective compression. Accompanying Figures 4 and 5 show LiteSpeed and GSE (that's Google server) have significantly better compression than the other three web servers in the test. Not all seven web servers were included in the test. This places LiteSpeed in the top tier (2 out of 7) along with GSE.

Dmitri tikhonov (talk) 00:58, 4 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• Another research paper from 2017 presented by at a different conference of another major organization by a team from Communication and Distributed Systems department of the largest technical university in Germany include LiteSpeed Web Server in the list of web servers that dominate H2-capable set of web server software (others being Nginx, IdeaWebServer, Apache, and IIS). ^[3]

That's absurd. Here's the entirety of what that paper says about LiteSpeed:

Last, we briefly comment on server software driving the H2-capable web as identified by the server field in the response header. Grouped by IP over all datasets, few server software dominate: Nginx 51.0%, IdeaWebServer 18.5%, LiteSpeed 9.2%, Apache 4.3%, and Microsoft IIS 5.4% for all probed IPs, respectively.

That's it. Doesn't say anything about LiteSpeed other than to mention that it exists. -- RoySmith (talk) 18:08, 30 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The paper is about HTTP/2 Server Push -- an empirical study. Without actual server implementations, there is no push; there is no study; there is no paper. The only paragraph to comment on the web servers lists LiteSpeed alongside the others, stating that it is these servers that dominate HTTP/2 landscape. I posit that this is significant. Dmitri tikhonov (talk) 04:24, 4 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

There are two things I would like to point out:

1. LiteSpeed is definitely being both noted and noticed.
2. Majority of the other web servers in the lists above -- Apache, H2O, IdeaWebServer, IIS, lighttpd, nghttpd, Nginx, Tengine, and Zeus -- have dedicated Wikipedia pages. (Those that do not have dedicated pages are either relative new (H2O, Tengine) or obscure for English-speaking audience (IdeaWebServer).)

Dmitri tikhonov (talk) 16:35, 16 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete fails WP:PRODUCT and WP:MILL, as nothing indicates why the "4th most popular web server available today" is markedly different from any other web server. Also contains language that violates WP:PROMO.--SamHolt6 (talk) 04:05, 17 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep and improve: I have changed my mind, since I believe the works cited by Dmitri tikhonov (talk · contribs) hold up and I have added them to the article. The fact that academics are referring to the software, and that it is mentioned in major books (e.g. those published by O'Reilly) about server administration, means it passes WP:MILL. It definitely requires further editing to remove WP:PROMO language, and could be shortened since some information relies too heavily on dubious sources, but the core of the article is fine, given these new sources, in my opinion. -- Pingumeister^(talk) 11:00, 17 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Weak keep - at least one editor has indicated above that independent sources support notability. The developer above must be careful to comply with WP:COI, but if others are willing to verify these sources and use them to clean up the article, then I'd support keeping it. Shelbystripes (talk) 16:55, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete -- an unremarkable software product; sources fail WP:CORPDEPTH / WP:SPIP. K.e.coffman (talk) 01:35, 5 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep seems to be improvable. DGG ( talk ) 01:55, 8 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.