perlbal

I'm looking for information on using and extending perlbal. Perlbal is an http load balancer / reverse proxy from sixapart/danga.

There is a bit of documentation with the source code:

• config-guide.txt
• Doc directory
• Doc/Hacking

I've found some good info in the slides from a YAPC 2009 talk : perpal-tutorial. It's at slideshare.net, so it requires flash or a login.

Ok, now that I've read all that, how do I set it up as a simple proxy/balancer between my internal service and n (small) external hosts, with connection pooling, persistent connections from perlbal to the external hosts?

My internal service will need to quickly send a request to each of the remote servers and then aggregate/modify the collective response. My internal service won't wait very long for the responses from the n hosts => slow responses (<~200ms?) will just be dropped from the algorithm.

... investigation continues.