Is it possible litespeed has a problem with mobile safari ?
 

I could be wrong but I am seeing strange, much longer page load times on mobile Safari from an iphone when connecting to litespeed 4.0.x

There are some subtle differences in Safari on iphone. Perhaps there is a timeout issue.

Does anyone have an easy way to test the same content from apache vs litespeed off their iphone?

I don't want to start "pointing fingers" until I have more data.

I know Chrome on Android is not experiencing any problems and it's also webkit based but there are definitely core differences between the two browsers.

You can try "tcpdump" on server side.
First, find out the IP of your iPhone.
Then run command

tcpdump -s0 -X host <ip_of_your_iphone>

think it is just the poor AT&T wireless network. ;)

If you don't mind I am going to PM you with some charts.

I turned off "smart keep alive" just to see if it makes any difference.

I am seeing roughly a 50% speed improvement, but it make be a fluke of course.

I will repeat the test late night on a weekend to see if super low traffic on their networks makes a difference.

I think I found the problem, maybe, mobile Safari is being picky.

LiteSpeed sends a Connection: Keep-Alive when the source is php output and does not allow php to override?

However the last thing I send on the page is a tracking gif, which I send as embedded packed hex, with header('Content-Type: image/gif') Content-Length: 43 and most importantly header('Connection: close')

The Connection: close is being removed/overwritten by litespeed with keep-alive, so safari keeps waiting for up to 5 seconds before it times out (or litespeed does).

How can I force litespeed to close the connection from php when I want it to?

(note that other browsers do not seem to have this problem so I am not blaming litespeed)

you can turn off keepalive with rewrite rule, like

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} iphone_user_agent_signature
RewriteRule . - [E=nokeepalive:1]

Oh excellent!

That is exactly the solution I was hoping for, based on useragent.

I wasn't aware litespeed could toggle things like keep-alive through htaccess

I will have to look for the docs.

OH! I see it's actually from apache. I never knew that directive!

But it's also over here http://store.litespeedtech.com/store...yarticle&id=21

Sadly this does not seem to be working.

Keep-Alive is still being sent

Even took out the condition and just tried by itself

RewriteRule . - [E=nokeepalive:1]

maybe it has to do with sending a different kind of Content-Type header from PHP which is making litespeed ignore it?

I'll try it on a plain PHP page.

Are you sure rewrite is properly enabled? maybe enable rewrite log.

A little later I am going to create a minimal testing environment to see what exactly is happening.

By the way, I don't suppose PUTENV can be used within PHP to send the same command?

http://php.net/manual/en/function.putenv.php

ie. putenv("nokeepalive:1") or maybe putenv("nokeepalive=1")

not sure even apache will obey that.