Hello,

I am investigating Pound as a possible alternative to Linux Virtual
Server, for loadbalancing HTTP, and possibly offloading HTTPS. So far,
Pound seems to be by far the most suitable open source project in
existence.

One feature that most alternatives seem to lack is Pound's
Session-feature. I've tested it (cookie-based) and it seems to do
the job perfectly well.

However, at times I will need to add or remove nodes from my cluster,
and that means restarting Pound, losing all Session-associations.

To fix this, one of two things need to happen:
a. make Pound reread the configuration file on SIGHUP or the like
b. make Pound save the Session associations to a file on shutdown (and
   possibly periodically) and have it read this file on startup

I'd say b) is the easy thing to do, while a) would be the cool thing
to have. b) with the periodic option would make crashes less of a problem
too :)

Has any work been done towards either of these options, and if so,
where should I start?

On a completely different note: my Apache/PHP processes are spending
a lot of time just waiting for clients to accept data, and then waiting
for clients to acknowledge the connection close (the famous linger
problem). A proxy like squid fetches the whole request from the server
as fast as it can, and then pushes it towards the client at the client's
pace, thus freeing the Apache server to serve another client.

From what I gather, Pound either pipes data per MAXBUF (2 kbyte) or per
chunk.  For the non-chunked case: would increasing MAXBUF to 16-32 kbyte
(most of our pages fit in 32kbyte) have the desired effect of relieving
the webserver immediately? And for the chunked case: what would be the
best way to have Pound 'read ahead'?

Thank you for your time :)

Regards,
Peter van Dijk