Any thoughts on using apache-tomcat(s) for load-balancing/failover VS 
tomcat-tomcat(s)?

Thanks

-----Original Message-----
From: David Wall [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 11:00 AM
To: Tomcat Users List
Subject: Re: Differences Between Apache and Tomcat

> As always, I would say start with tomcat by itself.  It's the simplest
> setup -- don't add Apache until you're sure you need it.  Tomcat will
> serve your static HTML pages just fine and fast.

It's important to realize that Apache is basically C code rather than
Java
code, so it tends to run faster and of course is much more mature.
Because
it's C code, though, it's more likely to have security issues related to
buffer overflows or the like.  This speed improvement may be even more
significant if you're using SSL.

Apache also has many other modules that may be useful, including proxy
support, URL rewriting and mass virtual hosting.

Apache supports lots of different plugin capabilities, so while Tomcat
can
do static content (HTML, images, javascripts) as well as JSP/servlets,
it
can't do CGI/Perl/PHP/Python, etc. that might be plugged into an Apache
web
server.  Of course, Apache can't do JSP/servlets or the others directly,
only via plugins.

To use port 80/443 with Tomcat, you have to launch it from 'root' on
Linux/Unix.  There may be a way to resolve that nowadays, but the last I
heard, that was still the case, and some people use simple
firewall/portmapping to push all port 80 traffic to port 8080 (or
whatever)
that Tomcat is actually listening on.

Many people use BOTH for performance reasons as well as security
reasons.
Apache tends to be fastest for static content and SSL processing, but
there's a performance hit when it has to forward the requests through
Tomcat
for JSP/servlet processing.  By putting Apache on the publicly
accessible
web server and then putting Tomcat on a private network that can be
reached
by the public web server only, only over the port configured for mod_jk,
you
can create a very secure Tomcat environment that is much harder to hack
into.  That's typically a good thing since the Tomcat application uses a
database and has all the business logic and JSP web pages that you want
to
protect the most.

Hope this helps...

David


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