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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