I just discovered pound a couple days ago, in a search to find a solution for load balancing webservers. In my situation, I have an app which picks the worst times possible to die, and it isn't something I can modify the source on. For sure, if visitors get an HTTP 500 series result, the app most certainly hung, and requests should be routed to the next available server.

I have gone through the archives, and see this that there is a feeling that HTTP 500 should not be used to determine server health. I'm here to tell you that it most certainly should, at least in my case.

In my case, I have no control over the source code, and providing service is the first priority. For me HTTP 500 = Service Unavailable. My world would be so much better if pound would let me mark as server returning HTTP 500 errors as dead, so it would skip it and use the next available server.

It would be great if this was at least an option that could be set in the .cfg file; "Offline on 500 err" or something like that.

Alan McCollough