I think it is not necessary, the overhead should be negligible, I do not have a number, but I think should be less than 0.01%, and performance increase in today's CPU should be far higher.
It is not that dangerous, you can set the per client throttling limits to limit the number of concurrent connection each client can have. It is a global configuration. cannot be overridden at this point.
LiteSpeed implement all common Apache modules natively, there is no shared code between LiteSpeed and Apache, LiteSpeed read the whole httpd.conf and work just like Apache.
If the file takes more than 60 seconds to be processed and there is no I/O on the socket, the connection will be closed. So, you need to increase it under server tuning configuration.
checked the core file, it does not match our current 4.0b3 binary. realized that the latest update of 4.0b3 has not been uploaded to your server. Just did that, please download and try again.
Yes, "lswsctrl restart" is graceful as well.
I am interested why the web console does not work.
If web console send the request to web server successful,
"Server restart request from admin interface!"
should be logged into error.log
Tried it in our lab. seems working fine, LSWS restarted successfully.
Can you create a test account and try to reproduced it? If it is reproducible, I will be more than interested in checking your server.
503 error is caused by PHP problem, either crash or have insufficient resource to complete the request. Some times caused by bug in opcode cache.
Your configuration looks fine.
You can check stderr.log see if any useful information has been logged in this regard.
some tips for trouble...