Building the APR Connector - BrainDump

We built the APR connector like this:

  # CFLAGS="-O3 -falign-functions=0 -march=athlon64 -mfpmath=sse -mmmx -msse -msse2 -
  msse3 -m3dnow -mtune=athlon64" ./configure --with-apr=/usr/bin/apr-1-config --
  prefix=/opt/tomcat/apr-connector
  # make && make install

We used the sameCFLAGS when building Apache httpd and mod_jk. Here’s how we built and installed mod_jk:

  # cd tomcat-connectors-1.2.20-src/native
  # CFLAGS="-O3 -falign-functions=0 -march=athlon64 -mfpmath=sse -mmmx -msse -msse2 -
  msse3 -m3dnow -mtune=athlon64" ./configure --with-apxs=/opt/httpd/bin/apxs
  [lots of configuration output removed]
  # make && make install

This assumes that the root directory of the Apache httpd we built is /opt/httpd.

We built the APR connector, httpd, and mod_jk with GCC 4.1.1:

  # gcc --version
  gcc (GCC) 4.1.1 20061011 (Red Hat 4.1.1-30)
  Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
  This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
  warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

We downloaded Apache httpd version 2.2.3 from http://httpd.apache.organd built it two different ways and benchmarked each of the resulting binaries. We built it for prefork MPM and worker MPM. These are different multithreading and multiprocess models that the server can use. Here are the settings we used for prefork and worker MPM:

  # prefork MPM
  <IfModule prefork.c>
  StartServers       8
  MinSpareServers    5
  MaxSpareServers   20
  ServerLimit      256
  MaxClients       256
  MaxRequestsPerChild 4000
  </IfModule>

  # worker MPM
  <IfModule worker.c>
  StartServers         3
  MaxClients         192
  MinSpareThreads      1
  MaxSpareThreads     64
  ThreadsPerChild     64
  MaxRequestsPerChild  0
  </IfModule>

We disabled Apache httpd’s common access log so that it would not need to log anything per each request (just as we configured Tomcat). And, we turned on Apache httpd’sKeepAliveconfiguration option:

  KeepAlive On
  MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
  KeepAliveTimeout 5

We enabled mod_proxy one of two ways at a time. First, for proxying via HTTP:

ProxyPass /tc http://127.0.0.1:8080/

ProxyPassReverse /tc http://127.0.0.1:8080/

Or, for proxying via AJP:

  ProxyPass        /tc ajp://127.0.0.1:8009/
  ProxyPassReverse /tc ajp://127.0.0.1:8009/

And, we configured mod_jk by adding this to httpd.conf:

LoadModule jk_module /opt/httpd/modules/mod_jk.so

JkWorkersFile /opt/httpd/conf/workers.properties

JkLogFile /opt/httpd/logs/mod_jk.log

JkLogLevel info

JkLogStampFormat "[%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y] "

JkOptions +ForwardKeySize +ForwardURICompat -ForwardDirectories

JkRequestLogFormat "%w %V %T"

JkMount /tc/* worker1

Plus we created a workers.properties file for mod_jk at the path we specified in the httpd.conffile:

  worker.list=worker1 
  worker.worker1.type=ajp13
  worker.worker1.host=localhost
  worker.worker1.port=8009
  worker.worker1.connection_pool_size=150
  worker.worker1.connection_pool_timeout=600
  worker.worker1.socket_keepalive=1

Of course, we enabled only one Apache httpd connector module at a time in the configuration.

Please check back next week for the continuation of this article.