After I posted a previous blog entry about configuring railo & tomcat with apache and mod_proxy_http, Paul Kukiel and Gary Gilbert suggested that I should be using mod_proxy_ajp.

This has been something I've been looking at, but haven't found a compelling reason for one over the other.

Proxy AJP is claimed to be faster as it is a "Wire protocol" but I couldn't find any benchmarks around this.

So I decided to do a very quick and dirty benchmark to satisfy my curiosity. This is not a scientific process, I just ran a simple railo testpage on the same machine with 50 threads of jmeter requests hitting it.

First I enabled proxy_http and ran it four times, then enabled proxy_ajp and repeated. The config is below:

Results:

Run	HTTP Requests/sec	AJP Requests/sec
Run 1	206.9	181.4
Run 2	203.9	143.6
Run 3	194.6	189.2
Run 4	204.6	191.4
Average	202.5	176.4

The results showed that the proxy_http module was faster - i.e. more requests per second could be pushed through.

I'm putting this down to the fact that proxy_ajp has to convert the http request into it's binary format, while proxy_http really just has to pass it along.

In different scenarios and network configurations the results may be different, but for now I'm going to stick with the http proxy.

Proxy AJP has one other benefit, in that is passes along some extra flags such as whether the request is https or not, but for our purposes we don't need this.

Cheers, Mark

More of a quick note to self about converting video formats:

To convert wmv to flash video:

This does the following:

• -i input.wmv - Load input file
• -ar 44100 - Resample audio to 44.1kHz.
• -qmax 8 magic voodoo about quality. Gave better results than not using it.
• out.flv save it as an flv.

Easy.

Updated: Changed the linking between railo and tomcat to use shared.loader.

I've been doing some more work on configuring railo to work flexibly in the numerous different environments we work in, and also making it simpler to set up.

To that end I investigated the use of mod_proxy for linking it to apache instead of mod_jk.

Advantages of this approach are:

• Simple - communications are in plain http
• Flexible - Load balancing can be easily added at the apache layer
• Simple - No compiling mod_jk

Here are the basic install instructions for Railo/Tomcat/Apache on Ubuntu.

Download & Install Tomcat

Download tomcat and extract content:

Move Tomcat to a more appropriate place:

Download Railo

Download Railo custom version jars file

Extract and move into Tomcat lib directory:

Make Tomcat load the railo jars by editing catalina.properties to change the shared loader path:

Make Tomcat and Railo work together by modifying the web config file:

add the following inside the <web-app> element:

add the following inside <welcome-file-list> element:

Start up tomcat:

Once this is done you should be able to access the railo admin by going to the following URL:

Back to Tomcat

To test our Railo installation, let's create a test site by adding a new virtual host in both Tomcat and Apache. We do this by modifying Tomcat server.xml file (/opt/tomcat/conf/server.xml )

Linking with Apache via Mod Proxy

Ensure the modules proxy and proxy_http are enabled. On Ubuntu this is done as follows:

Create vhost

Now we need to create a virtual host entry in Apache as well:

This tells apache to forward all requests for CFM files to the railo instance.

Finally restart apache and railo and you should be good to go.

Having searched around for how to make CSS work when migrating to Flex 4 from Flex 3 and finding lots of incorrect namespace declarations I thought I'd blog this as a reminder to myself:

If you have a current Flex3 project and you are migrating to Flex4 you need to add the following lines at the top of your stylesheet.

This makes the default non-namespaced items in your stylesheet refer to the MX components. eg:

And to style up spark buttons you simply use:

Note there were lots of ones that I found that were wrong.

Do NOT use:

This info was sourced from the Flex SDK Wiki.