Perlbal and Rails

[Philip Murray]

Hi,

I'm looking at trying Perlbal to load-balance a cluster of Mongrel  
processes running a Rails app over several machines. I'm currently  
using Apache2.2 and mod_proxy_balance, but hope that Perlbal can do a  
better job.

The only feature Perlbal seems to be missing that I'd need to make it  
a drop-in replacement is best illustrated by the Apache config snippet:

     # Redirect all non-static requests to cluster
     RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
     RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ balancer://mongrel-nz%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]

Basically, if the file exists locally serve it. If it doesn't exist  
locally, proxy it to one of the backends.

In a sense this is kind of combining the web_server role with the  
reverse_proxy role, is it curently possible to do this with Perlbal?



Cheers
Philip Murray