I’ve been working on the section in the training course dealing with mod_caucho, Resin’s Apache plugin. This is one of the last things I’m working on and for good reason. Dealing with Apache is a pain and usually unnecessary. If you can avoid using Apache with Resin, we recommend it. There are lots of good reasons not to use Apache:

• Apache isn’t any faster than Resin for serving static files (unless they’re really big)
• Resin has had rewrite-rules which obviate the need for Apache as a rewrite engine
• Resin Professional has a much better load balancer which takes into account number of connections, CPU load, and other factors in assigning new connections

I think a lot people who upgrade from Tomcat to Resin are used to using Apache with their Java Servlet engine because Tomcat had a reputation of operating better with Apache. I’m not sure if that’s even true in Tomcat’s case, but it’s certainly not in Resin’s.

So should you ever use Apache? Maybe. If you’ve got a highly heterogeneous site with lots of different applications using a variety of modules like mod_perl or mod_python, you might be better off with Apache on the front end.

Finally, one quick note: We just had a support request come in about using Apache 1.3. We have deprecated support for Apache 1.3 and I just verified that Resin 3.1.7a doesn’t work with it. Resin 3.2.0 does, but don’t rely on this in the future. Either upgrade to Apache 2 or get off of Apache entirely. You’ll thank yourself later.

Tags: apache, resin, tomcat

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Engineering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.