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Apache HTTP Server vs Apache Tomcat: What are the differences?
What is Apache HTTP Server? The most popular web server on the Internet since April 1996. The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.
What is Apache Tomcat? An open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.
Apache HTTP Server and Apache Tomcat can be primarily classified as "Web Servers" tools.
"Web server" is the primary reason why developers consider Apache HTTP Server over the competitors, whereas "Easy" was stated as the key factor in picking Apache Tomcat.
Apache HTTP Server and Apache Tomcat are both open source tools. It seems that Apache Tomcat with 3.44K GitHub stars and 2.36K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Apache HTTP Server with 2.19K GitHub stars and 652 GitHub forks.
Slack, MIT, and PedidosYa are some of the popular companies that use Apache HTTP Server, whereas Apache Tomcat is used by MIT, Zillow, and Bodybuilding.com. Apache HTTP Server has a broader approval, being mentioned in 6176 company stacks & 1048 developers stacks; compared to Apache Tomcat, which is listed in 562 company stacks and 419 developer stacks.
I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities. Ready, aim fire!
NGINXI would pick nginx over both IIS and Apace HTTP Server any day. Combine it with docker, and as you grow maybe even traefik, and you'll have a really flexible solution for serving http content where you can take sites and projects up and down without effort, easily move it between systems and dont have to handle any dependencies on your actual local machine.
From a StackShare Community member: "We are a LAMP shop currently focused on improving web performance for our customers. We have made many front-end optimizations and now we are considering replacing Apache with nginx. I was wondering if others saw a noticeable performance gain or any other benefits by switching."
NGINXI use nginx because it is very light weight. Where Apache tries to include everything in the web server, nginx opts to have external programs/facilities take care of that so the web server can focus on efficiently serving web pages. While this can seem inefficient, it limits the number of new bugs found in the web server, which is the element that faces the client most directly.
NGINXI use nginx because its more flexible and easy to configure
Apache HTTP ServerI use Apache HTTP Server because it's intuitive, comprehensive, well-documented, and just works
For us, NGINX is a lite HTTP server easy to configure. On our research, we found a well-documented software we a lot of support from the community.
We have been using it alongside tools like certbot and it has been a total success.
We can easily configure our sites and have a folder for available vs enabled sites, and with the nginx -t command we can easily check everything is running fine.
- Server rendered HTML output from PHP is being migrated to the client as Vue.js components, future plans to provide additional content, and other new miscellaneous features all result in a substantial increase of static files needing to be served from the server. NGINX has better performance than Apache for serving static content.
- The change to NGINX will require switching from PHP to PHP-FPM resulting in a distributed architecture with a higher complexity configuration, but this is outweighed by PHP-FPM being faster than PHP for processing requests.
- The NGINX + PHP-FPM setup now allows for horizontally scaling of resources rather vertically scaling the previously combined Apache + PHP resources.
- PHP shell tasks can now efficiently be decoupled from the application reducing main application footprint and allow for scaling of tasks on an individual basis.
I was in a situation where I have to configure 40 RHEL servers 20 each for Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat server. My task was to 1. configure LVM with required logical volumes, format and mount for HTTP and Tomcat servers accordingly. 2. Install apache and tomcat. 3. Generate and apply selfsigned certs to http server. 4. Modify default ports on Tomcat to different ports. 5. Create users on RHEL for application support team. 6. other administrative tasks like, start, stop and restart HTTP and Tomcat services.
I have utilized the power of ansible for all these tasks, which made it easy and manageable.
Pros of Apache HTTP Server
- Web server478
- Most widely-used web server305
- Virtual hosting218
- Fast148
- Ssl support138
- Since 199645
- Asynchronous28
- Robust5
- Proven over many years4
- Mature1
- Perfect Support1
- Perfomance1
- Many available modules0
- Many available modules0
Pros of Apache Tomcat
- Easy79
- Java72
- Popular49
- Spring web1
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Cons of Apache HTTP Server
- Hard to set up3
Cons of Apache Tomcat
- Blocking - each http request block a thread1
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What is Apache HTTP Server?
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