• Introduction
• HTTP
• AJP

Choosing a connector to use with cat can be difficult. This page will list the connectors which are supported with this cat release, and will hopefully help you make the right choice according to your needs.

The HTTP connector is setup by default with cat, and is ready to use. This connector features the lowest latency and best overall performance.

For clustering, a HTTP load balancer with support for web sessions stickiness must be installed to direct the traffic to the cat servers. cat supports mod_proxy (on Apache HTTP Server 2.x, and included by default in Apache HTTP Server 2.2) as the load balancer. It should be noted that the performance of HTTP proxying is usually lower than the performance of AJP, so AJP clustering is often preferable.

When using a single server, the performance when using a native webserver in front of the cat instance is most of the time significantly worse than a standalone cat with its default HTTP connector, even if a large part of the web application is made of static files. If integration with the native webserver is needed for any reason, an AJP connector will provide faster performance than proxied HTTP. AJP clustering is the most efficient from the cat perspective. It is otherwise functionally equivalent to HTTP clustering.

The native connectors supported with this cat release are:

• JK 1.2.x with any of the supported servers
• mod_proxy on Apache HTTP Server 2.x (included by default in Apache HTTP Server 2.2), with AJP enabled

Other native connectors supporting AJP may work, but are no longer supported.