Tomcat Performance and Tomcat Connectors

if you are looking to squeeze some extra performance out of Tomcat  one of the places to look is at the connectors and their settings. Connectors are the mean by which external applications gain access to the output of Tomcat's servlet (Catalina) and JSP(Jasper) engines. By default Tomcat comes with two connectors already setup, the HTTP connector on port 8080 and the AJP connector on port 8009.
AJP is a binary protocol that should be faster for front-end web servers to access than verbose text based protocols such as HTTP. It is really intended for binary access to Tomcat by web servers such as Apache HTTP. The AJP connector is different to the HTTP connector in that there are two places to tune the settings. Both the HTTP and AJP connector can be tune in server.xml, but the AJP connector can also be tune in apache.conf for example. These are the "client" setting for the AJP connector such as mod_jk and mod_proxy.
Just to confuse issues, Tomcat has three implementations of connectors that implement the HTTP and AJP protocol. In fact there seems to be multiple uses of the term "connectors" in Tomcat documentation. A connector is both a port and protocol, as well as a code library that implements the connectors. So besides changing the settings for a connector you also need to choose the most appropriate implementation.