After reading “Introducing Apache Tomcat 6″ presentation by Mladen Turk I decided to enable Apache Portable Runtime (APR) native library for Tomcat. It was supposed to be as easy as

sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

but as you may guess, it was a little bit more than that.

1. Installing Apache APR.

“Most Linux distributions will ship packages for APR” – those of Linode don’t, I had a barebone Ubuntu 10.10 box without even "gcc" and "make", let alone Apache APR. Thanks God, networking was not an issue, unlike last time.

wget http://apache.spd.co.il//apr/apr-1.4.2.tar.gz
tar -xzf apr-1.4.2.tar.gz
rm apr-1.4.2.tar.gz
cd apr-1.4.2/
sudo apt-get install make
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

 
2. Installing Tomcat Native.

wget http://off.co.il/apache//tomcat/tomcat-connectors/native/1.1.20/source/tomcat-native-1.1.20-src.tar.gz
tar -xzf tomcat-native-1.1.20-src.tar.gz
rm tomcat-native-1.1.20-src.tar.gz
cd tomcat-native-1.1.20-src/jni/native
sudo ./configure --with-apr=/usr/local/apr

The result was

checking build system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
..
checking for APR... yes
..
checking for JDK location (please wait)... checking Try to guess JDK location... 
configure: error: can't locate a valid JDK location

Ouch! "Can't locate a valid JDK location"? On my machine?

$ which java
/home/user/java/jdk/bin/java
$ echo $JAVA_HOME
/home/user/java/jdk
$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_24"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_24-b07)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 19.1-b02, mixed mode)

But for some reason "tomcat-native-1.1.20-src/jni/native/configure" script didn’t see my "JAVA_HOME" variable no matter what and even installing "sun-java6-jdk" didn’t help much. After patching the "configure" script to dump locations it was looking for “valid JDK” I had:

..
configure: [/usr/local/1.6.1]
configure: [/usr/local/IBMJava2-1.6.0]
configure: [/usr/local/java1.6.0]
configure: [/usr/local/java-1.6.0]
configure: [/usr/local/jdk1.6.0]
configure: [/usr/local/jdk-1.6.0]
configure: [/usr/local/1.6.0]
configure: [/usr/local/IBMJava2-1.6]
configure: [/usr/local/java1.6]
configure: [/usr/local/java-1.6]
configure: [/usr/local/jdk1.6]
configure: [/usr/local/jdk-1.6]
..

Ok then, here you have it now:

sudo ln -s ~/java/jdk/ /usr/local/jdk-1.6
sudo ./configure --with-apr=/usr/local/apr
sudo make
sudo make install

And with

..
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH='$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/apr/lib'
..

I now had a beautiful log message in "catalina.out":

..
Mar 7, 2011 11:51:02 PM org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener init
INFO: Loaded APR based Apache Tomcat Native library 1.1.20.
Mar 7, 2011 11:51:02 PM org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener init
INFO: APR capabilities: IPv6 [true], sendfile [true], accept filters [false], random [true].
Mar 7, 2011 11:51:03 PM org.apache.coyote.AbstractProtocolHandler init
..

s soon as "evgeny-goldin.org" moves to its new location on the brand-new Linode box it will benefit from this performance optimization. I’ll describe the migration process and reasons for it a bit later, once it is done.

From http://evgeny-goldin.com/blog/ubuntu-installing-apr-tomcat/