Home / server / Questions / 25385
Accepted
Sasha Chedygov
Asked: 2009-06-14 18:56:37 +0800 CST

Why use Apache in front of another web server?

  • 772

I've seen a lot of web server setups where Apache is in front of another web server. The most prominent examples of these are the Java web servers, e.g. Glassfish, Tomcat, etc. What is the point of this? I realize the point of putting Apache in front of, say, a Mongrel cluster is load balancing, but what about other servers? What are the reasons for doing this?

apache-2.2 web-server

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Web application servers are good at hosting their application (Ruby, Java, etc), but not as good as Apache at hosting static files, or providing load balancing/failover (mod_proxy), security/filtering (mod_security), rewriting (mod_rewrite) etc. Therefore it's quite common to use Apache as the front end, possibly serving all the static content, and then proxying requests to the application server (mongrel, tomcat, etc).

    Apache is a well-audited piece of code that has "been around the block" somewhat more than the newer servers, so it makes sense to have it as the server that faces the untrusted Internet. It also means you can put your application servers inside your network, and your Apache servers in your DMZ.

    • 11

  2. As to your other question -

    Another question, then: If I were to do this with, say, a Java server behind Apache, would I use multiple instances?

    Depends :) Whats the load like? Whats the memory usage like? How would you distribute them - multiple Java app servers on the same box? Different boxes? The appropriate configuration depends on what the problem you're trying to solve is.

    • 0