In my last blog post, I mentioned that there is a performance difference between Tomcat’s APR and BIO / default connector. In this blog I did a quick comparison of these connectors.
Tomcat ships with 3 HTTP(s) connectors:
- Blocking IO (org.apache.coyote.Http11Protocol): this is the default and most stable connector.
- Non-blocking IO (org.apache.coyote.Http11NioProtocol): this is a non-blocking IO connector, which you will need for Comet/WebSockets and should offer slightly better performance in most cases.
- APR (org.apache.coyote.Http11AprProtocol): this connector uses Apache Portable Runtime and OpenSSL instead of their Java counterparts. Because of this, performance is generally better, especially when using SSL.
To do a quick comparison of these connectors, I used ApacheBench and ran some simulated load tests (100k requests, 100 concurrent requests) on the various connectors. The page requested was a simple JSP that displayed the current date. Tomcat 7.0.26 ran on Windows (yeah, really, it can run on Windows), and to compare with the Apache HTTPD and PHP I also did a run on a simple PHP page displaying the current date on Apache 2.2.16 (on Linux). Tests were done using HTTP and HTTPS, with and without keep-alive. The results are by no means scientifically significant, but give a general idea on the performance differences. YMMV, so please run your own benchmarks on your own applications (and create a more intelligent test scenario, using for instance Apache JMeter).
| Connector |
HTTP |
HTTP KEEP-ALIVE |
HTTPS |
HTTPS KEEP-ALIVE |
| BIO |
7341 |
14809 |
142 |
4036 |
| NIO |
3816 |
10257 |
– |
– |
| APR |
8214 |
15062 |
240 |
11121 |
| Apache HTTPD |
8780 |
15880 |
236 |
4056 |
Numbers are in request per second, higher is better. Due to some ApacheBench bug I could not test NIO over HTTPS. Some conclusions we can draw from these results:
- Apache Tomcat performs on a level comparable to Apache HTTPD. This is at least the case for dynamic requests, but I have seen similar results for static requests.
- When using SSL: use keep-alive, unless you have a specific reason not to.
- When using SSL on Tomcat: use APR.
- Don’t expect NIO to give a better performance than BIO out of the box. Benchmark, benchmark, benchmark.
