debugging mod_proxy performance with WireShark

[Dustin Chesterman <dchester11@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey all-
  I wasn't sure if I posted this correctly since I did it before my confirmation email from subscribing and it looked different in the archives.  I'm looking for any ideas why my apache proxy would be causing such a huge performance hit to our web app.  Thanks! :)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dustin Chesterman <dchester11@xxxxxxxxx>
To: users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2010 10:24:35 -0700
Subject: debugging mod_proxy performance with WireShark
Hi all- 
 
 I am new to Apache httpd and have gotten about as far as I can 
debugging some performance problems we are having on a machine.  It is a
 VM with Fedora 13 installed. I am running a stand alone JIRA Tomcat 
installation on port 8080 and running httpd with mod_proxy as a reverse 
proxy on the same box.  If I remove the httpd layer and go directly to 
Tomcat the performance is normal.  When I add the httpd layer it slows 
down overall and hangs dramatically fairly often.  I installed Wireshark
 and have captured some requests but I'm not really sure what I'm 
looking for.  How can I tell what's going on in the time between some of
 the traffic going on?  I also configured Flood but that doesn't seem to
 offer me any insight into what is causing the problem either.  I'm 
likely not using these tools quite right but I can't seem to find out 
what I should be looking for.

Here are my two VHosts.  I am redirecting to HTTPS also, but if I take that layer out, it still has performance issues.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
    RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}


</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost 192.168.XXX.XXX:443>
#<VirtualHost 192.168.XXX.XXX:80>
    ServerName 192.168.XXX.XXX
    ProxyRequests Off
    ProxyPreserveHost On
    SSLEngine On
    SSLCertificateFile /etc/httpd/ssl/jirassl-pem.crt


    SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/httpd/ssl/jirassl.key
    ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8080/


    <Proxy *>
        Order deny,allow
        Allow from all
    </Proxy>
</VirtualHost>


Any
 suggestions insight into where i can find info to help me learn to 
debug issues with httpd in general would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks all
-Dustin Chesterman