posted by mthomas on April 14, 2010 11:14 PM

The short answer is that this is a myth. The longer answer is that back in the days of Tomcat 3 there was some truth to this depending on circumstances. However, for the versions of Tomcat in use today (5.5.x and 6.0.x) then there is no need to use httpd for purely performance reasons. Tomcat now supports the native/APR connector which uses the same native library (the Apache Portable Runtime—APR) as httpd for the low-level I/O and therefore can achieve similar performance to httpd. When serving static content there is ever so slightly more overhead when using Tomcat compared to httpd but the differences are so small they are unlikely to be noticeable in production systems.

If you research the httpd vs Tomcat performance issue, you will find a variety of load and performance benchmarks that show a range of results. An often quoted result shows that Tomcat's pure Java connector is consistently faster than httpd.

This particular result is the opposite of what is expected. httpd should be significantly faster than Tomcat's pure Java connector. This result is probably caused by the size of the file used. Tomcat caches small static files in memory by default and this will provide a significant performance improvement. httpd does not cache files in memory by default. This demonstrates quite nicely how the definition of the benchmark can have a significant impact on the results.

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posted by avanabs on April 7, 2010 07:43 AM

One area that is getting a lot of attention in these days of "do more with less" is the cost of infrastructure maintenance. Many studies show that maintaining software is much more expensive over it's life cycle than purchasing/building it in the first place, so IT management is looking at these costs with renewed interest. The issue turns out to be a bit more complex than it originally appears, although one thing that leaps out is that all of the options for supporting Tomcat are far better than the options we all had with commercial JEE Application Servers. First, let's look at what we mean by "support". In this series of blogs, I'll be sharing some thoughts about the various supportions available for Tomcat, as well as contrasting those with the JEE commercial Application Server support situation.

Enterprise Application Server Support

While it is theoretically possible to forgo support entirely, and sometimes this is forced by software vendor failure or acquisition/product retirement, realistically IT organizations require ongoing support for their mission critical infrastructure. In this post, we will be discussing the various options available to IT organizations for supporting Tomcat environments. We will also be discussing the important differences between commercial proprietary closed source vendor JEE application server support and Apache Tomcat.

One of the most important and valuable “features” of Tomcat from the IT Operations point of view is support choice. Proprietary software can only be supported by the vendor, at that vendor’s monopolistic support pricing, while using Tomcat provides multiple viable options in a competitive support environment. Hardly surprisingly, excellent Tomcat support can therefore be obtained at much lower cost. That said, while Tomcat itself is “free”, there are real internal and external costs associated with using Tomcat as an IT infrastructure. It is important to understand these costs when comparing the various support options.

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