APR is an accelerator that takes advantage of native OS/hardware features. It sacrifices "write once/run anywhere" in the Tomcat server (bot not the webapps) for performance. On Windows, it's available precompiled. For Linux, you have to build it as part of a custom Tomcat build.
I'm under the impression that the performance
boost is only modest. I prefer to keep enough spare capacity in my vanilla Tomcat servers rather than use APR. but you may feel differently.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.
