prefork MPM still the default for apache24?

[Bill Moran]

I was recently doing some load testing on a new tomcat application I'm working on.

Long story short: I found that a performance issue I was hitting was the result of
Apache being built with the prefork MPM. Rebuilding with the event MPM increased
performace to the same speed as connecting to tomcat directly, which was 20x
faster than communicating through Apache using the (default) prefork MPM.

This is a tomcat 8 app running on FreeBSD 10.0 with Apache 2.4

This leads me to a few questions:

Is there some reason the event MPM is not the default? The Apache community seems to
think that it should be (at least, the people I talked to). Is there some obscure
issue with it on FreeBSD?

Luckily the ports system makes it easy to rebuild Apache with a different MPM, but
I'm worried that since the prebuilt version installed by pkg still uses prefork,
that a lot of people are getting an underperforming server for no reason.

-- 
Bill Moran
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