Very entertaining reading! Thanks Chris and Mark for re-benchmarking, explaining, and giving your opinions on the results. I'm not entirely sure how I missed Chris' benchmark results email, almost exactly one year ago now. Chris: there are no units on your results numbers, and I'm not seeing any procedure you used, nor any configurations you used, so I'm not sure how to interpret the numbers. It would be great to get more information about how the benchmark was conducted, which HTTP client was used, and what server hardware was used.
I tried to write my benchmark such that it is fully documented and repeatable all the way down to the configuration used on both the client and the server, etc. I also wanted to be completely clear and up front about the specific scenarios I was benchmarking -- there are many more that I wasn't -- so I wrote the explanations into the text as well. The results are, of course, only about the kinds of requests we're benchmarking, and also about the configuration(s) used. I did try to think up and benchmark the most likely use cases for serving typical webapp content, but anyone can say their webapp isn't like that. :) Plus, I tried to write my benchmark to both inspire others to conduct and publish more benchmarks, and also to show a detailed example of one that others could modify and re-use. I was hoping to see more published benchmarks by now, but each one I find is really entertaining. I'm happy to see that Chris' independent benchmark numbers help to show that it is indeed a myth that Tomcat needs HTTPD in front of it in order to get good performance serving static files. And, it's great to see benchmark results for file sizes that I wasn't able to benchmark. Mark: I like your text about some of the other reasons people want to use HTTPD -- it is spot on, and in fact there are so many modules out there for it, there are countless logical reasons to use it. Thanks for the additional analysis. It helps. -- Jason On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 5:50 PM, Mark Thomas <ma...@apache.org> wrote: > On 25/03/2010 00:26, Hassan Schroeder wrote: > > Just to get this into the archives for the next time it comes up > > > > < > http://tomcatexpert.com/blog/2010/03/24/myth-or-truth-one-should-always-use-apache-httpd-front-apache-tomcat-improve-perform > > > > > > because I don't know if the author (a certain "mthomas") will mention > > it here. :-) > > > > (via @springsource on Twitter) > > Chris deserves a lot of the credit. Without his figures, it is just > opinion. > > I'll have to see if I can get the graph to display as well. It is nice > to have the hard figures but the graph gives you a quicker handle on the > data. > > Mark > >
