Pound is a lightweight open source reverse proxy program suitable to be used as a web server load balancing solution. Developed by an IT security company, it has a strong emphasis on security. Using regular expression matching on the requested URLs, Pound can pass different kinds of requests to different backend server groups. A few more of its most important features: Open source software refers to computer software available with its source code and under an open source license. ... A reverse proxy is a proxy server that is installed within the neighborhood of one or more servers. ... Wikimedia servers architecture The term Web server can mean one of two things: A computer that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from clients, which are known as Web browsers, and serving them HTTP responses along with optional data contents, which usually are Web pages such as HTML documents and... In computing, load balancing is a technique (usually performanced by load balancers) to spread work between many computers, processes, computers, disks or other resources in order to get optimal resource utilization and decrease computing time. ... Information Technology (IT)[1] is a broad subject concerned with the use of technology in managing and processing information, especially in large organizations. ... A regular expression (abbreviated as regexp or regex, with plural forms regexps, regexes, or regexen) is a string that describes or matches a set of strings, according to certain syntax rules. ... Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a technical, Web-related term used in two distinct meanings: in popular usage, it is a widespread synonym for Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)—many popular and technical texts will use the term URL when referring to URI; in strict technical usage, it is a subset...

• detects when a backend server fails or recovers, and bases its load balancing decisions on this information: if a backend server fails, it will not receive requests until it recovers
• decrypts https requests to http ones
• rejects incorrect requests
• can be used in a chroot environment
• has no special requirements concerning which web server software or browser to use
• supports virtual hosts
• highly configurable

Pound is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License and can be used free of charge even in business environments. https is a URI scheme which is syntactically identical to the http: scheme normally used for accessing resources using HTTP. Using an https: URL indicates that HTTP is to be used, but with a different default port (443) and an additional encryption/authentication layer between HTTP and TCP. This system... Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a method used to transfer or convey information on the World Wide Web. ... A chroot on Unix operating systems is an operation which changes the root directory. ... The GNU logo The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project. ...

See also

• Crossroads (software)
• HAProxy
• mod_proxy_balancer
• Pure Load Balancer

External links

• Pound website
• Pound mailing list archive
• Pound Best Practice Deployment
• Simple webserver load balancing with Pound (for version 1)