I'm not sure whether it was mentioned before. For me it would be great to have the possibility to track a 'health page' of the back ends. For example pound should retrieve every X seconds a special page which only content is 'OK' or 'FAIL'. This would give me the possibility to do some health checks like DB lookups, server status and so on and drop a backend even when apache (the server) is still responding.
I know there is the HAport directive but to my mind it's a very complicate way...

Malte