I'm looking at reverse proxy software for load balancing/failover of web 
traffic.

Pound is almost ideal - particularly because it can handle virtual hosts 
(although I know the website recommends against that) - but one show 
stopping aspect for me is the fairly basic config reloading facility - 
whereby we would just have to reload the thing in a fairly brutal manner 
(losing any current connections etc.)

So I saw people recommending HaProxy, which has kinder config reloading, 
but it doesn't do virtual hosting. (i.e. I can't redirect requests to 
different backend servers based on the incoming host name - or at least, 
I've not worked out a way to do it, in HaProxy itself...).

So I was wondering if anyone has worked out a way to get around the 
fairly abrupt nature of config reloads in Pound? By using CARP, or 
anything else? I also saw the idea of running a pound instance in front 
of two back pount instances, and reconfiguring one while other is 'live' 
- anyone tried this?

Any ideas anyone?
thanks!
Alex

[...]

... probably does not help ... but virtual hosting and sessions is 
handled by the application servers ... pound is purely a load balancer

Alex Hunsley wrote:[...]

[...]