Speed up images in Tomcat 6

Question

In tomcat 6 i have a servlet running openbluedragon, everything compiles and servers up quik, with the exception of images, they really lag significantly. Any suggestions optimization for image serving?

Here is my server.xml:

    <Service name="Catalina">

      <Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" />
      <Connector port="8080" maxThreads="100" protocol="HTTP/1.1" connectionTimeout="20000" />
      <Engine name="Standalone" defaultHost="hostname.whatever" jvmRoute="ajp13">

      <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm" resourceName="UserDatabase"/>
      <Host name="hostname.whatever"  appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">
        ...context
      </Host>

    </Engine>
  </Service>

Answer 1

Another option is to use apache as a frontend, connecting tomcat with mod_jk. This way you can let apache serve static content (e.g. images, css, javascript) and let tomcat generate the dynamic content. Might leave a bit of work to separate the static content from the dynamic ones, but works great for me.

On Unix, having an apache as frontend is a nice option because being bound to port 80 you're often forced to run as root. Apache knows how to drop root permissions after binding a port, Tomcat doesn't. You don't want a server faced to the public to run as root.

(This is similar to the reverse proxy answer, but doesn't involve a proxy but mod_jk)