Is anyone aware of any recent benchmarks comparing Tomcat and Apache web server when it comes to the performance of serving static files?

We all know that there are many advantages of fronting Tomcat by Apache on high traffic sites, but are modern versions of Tomcat (5.5 with/out APR or 6.0 with/out APR/Comet-NIO) able to match Apache's ability to serve static files under high load?

Does anyone have any first-hand experiences with this?

Hi Aleksandar.

Yes. I spent quite a bit of time benchmarking the static file performance of Tomcat versus Apache httpd, and just last month published the findings in the new O'Reilly Tomcat book. The results of the benchmarks are so interesting that I pursuaded O'Reilly to publish the benchmarks as the book's sample chapter, which you can find here:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596101060/chapter/index.html

Not only is Tomcat able to match Apache httpd's performance in all cases that I benchmarked, but it turns out that Tomcat is usually significantly faster.

That's exactly what I was looking for! The results are really surprising!

I guess the only thing missing (in my mind) is the difference between Apache httpd and Tomcat when serving large files (e.g. over 48KB, or even larger).

Anyway, I'm planning to do some benchmarking myself. I'll let you know how it goes!