Tips on Fine Tuning Apache 2.2 for high performance

1. If you run Apache as front-end, use mod_jk. Its performance is much better than mod_proxy.
2. If you serve HTTP directly or use mod_proxy, use the NIO connector in Tomcat 6.
3. Make sure your thread pool (maxThreads) is large enough, default is only 200.
4. Make Tomcat state-less. Especially, don't use HttpSession. The state may cause memory leak in the app and degrade the performance gradually. Push all your state to database or client (cookies).
5. Do use Database pooling (DBCP). We have MySQL, the JDBC driver is very chatty.
6. If you run one instance of JMeter, it may become the bottleneck. Run multiple slaves from different networks to simulate real production load.
7. stead of `commons-dbcp`, better use `tomcat-jdbc`. DBCP is namely singlethreaded.

By ZZ Coder