First off...  the man page says

	... Use "big iron" if you expect heavy loads

What is "heavy"?  I'm considering pound as a replacement for a pair of
Cisco CSS11150's currently handling between 8 and 12 million hits a day.
Given a fairly involved configuration (six back-ends, about 60 domains
and about 80 content rules for now, no SSL), what kind of server
horsepower should be used?  Room for growth would be good, and I'd
rather not have to give up limbs for a box from Foundry or F5.

Second...  we've come up against a limit in the CSS11150.  It has a
static-sized table of 32k IP addresses for maintaining IP-based
stickiness.  If you specify "Session IP" in Pound, is there a maximum
number of sessions that can be maintained, or will Pound simply eat
memory as required to grow the table?
[...]

On Tuesday 01 June 2004 17.23, Paul Chvostek wrote:[...]

That is not a very high load (average under 150 requests/second, thus probably 
under 400 reqs/sec peak). A single machine (possibly dual CPU) would deal 
easily with that, provided you really don't need SSL. If you do: investing in 
a hardware accelerator would be a good idea.
[...]

Pound does NOT keep any static IP table, but uses a hash function to always 
map the same IP address to the same back-end. You are therefore not limited 
in any way.

Please note that this is far from optimal: if you have a lot of NAT clients 
you may have less than ideal load balancing. Other methods (URL/Cookie) would 
probably work better.[...]