StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Web Servers
  5. Apache Tomcat vs Lwan

Apache Tomcat vs Lwan

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Stacks16.9K
Followers12.6K
Votes201
GitHub Stars8.0K
Forks5.3K
Lwan
Lwan
Stacks1
Followers6
Votes4
GitHub Stars6.0K
Forks551

Lwan vs Apache Tomcat: What are the differences?

Lwan: Experimental, scalable, high performance HTTP server. In development for almost 3 years, Lwan was until now a personal research effort that focused mostly on building a solid infrastructure for a lightweight and speedy web server; Apache Tomcat: An open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Lwan and Apache Tomcat belong to "Web Servers" category of the tech stack.

Lwan and Apache Tomcat are both open source tools. It seems that Lwan with 5.01K GitHub stars and 524 forks on GitHub has more adoption than Apache Tomcat with 3.51K GitHub stars and 2.4K GitHub forks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Apache Tomcat, Lwan

Hari
Hari

Mar 3, 2020

Needs advice

I was in a situation where I have to configure 40 RHEL servers 20 each for Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat server. My task was to

  1. configure LVM with required logical volumes, format and mount for HTTP and Tomcat servers accordingly.
  2. Install apache and tomcat.
  3. Generate and apply selfsigned certs to http server.
  4. Modify default ports on Tomcat to different ports.
  5. Create users on RHEL for application support team.
  6. other administrative tasks like, start, stop and restart HTTP and Tomcat services.

I have utilized the power of ansible for all these tasks, which made it easy and manageable.

419k views419k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Lwan
Lwan

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

In development for almost 3 years, Lwan was until now a personal research effort that focused mostly on building a solid infrastructure for a lightweight and speedy web server.

-
Low memory footprint (~500KiB for 10k idle connections);Minimal memory allocations & copies;Minimal system calls;Hand-crafted HTTP request parser;Static file serving uses the most efficient way according to file size;No copies between kernel and userland for files larger than 16KiB;Smaller files are sent using vectored I/O;Header overhead is considered before considering deflate compression;Mostly wait-free multi-threaded design;One thread accepts connections, one I/O thread per logical CPU handles them;Hand-crafted coroutines makes asynchronous I/O a breeze in C;Linux only, as it relies on epoll();Purpose-built I/O loop;Efficient loading cache used for;Directory listing;File information (size, last modified date, MIME type, etc);Compressed files;Diminute codebase with roughly 7200 lines of C code
Statistics
GitHub Stars
8.0K
GitHub Stars
6.0K
GitHub Forks
5.3K
GitHub Forks
551
Stacks
16.9K
Stacks
1
Followers
12.6K
Followers
6
Votes
201
Votes
4
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 79
    Easy
  • 72
    Java
  • 49
    Popular
  • 1
    Spring web
Cons
  • 3
    Blocking - each http request block a thread
  • 2
    Easy to set up
Pros
  • 1
    C and Lua Scripting
  • 1
    Free
  • 1
    High-performance http server
  • 1
    Performance

What are some alternatives to Apache Tomcat, Lwan?

NGINX

NGINX

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

Apache HTTP Server

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Unicorn

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

Microsoft IIS

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Passenger

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

Jetty

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

lighttpd

lighttpd

lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Swoole

Swoole

It is an open source high-performance network framework using an event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking I/O model which makes it scalable and efficient.

Puma

Puma

Unlike other Ruby Webservers, Puma was built for speed and parallelism. Puma is a small library that provides a very fast and concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby web applications.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase