Until the time comes when Amazon will offer a load balancing service in their EC2 environment, people are forced to use a software-based load balancing solution. One of the most common out there is HAProxy. I've been looking at it for the past 2 months or so, and recently we started to use it in production here at OpenX. I am very impressed with its performance and capabilities. I'll explore here some of the functionality that HAProxy offers, and also discuss some of the non-obvious aspects of its configuration.

Man, this makes it REALLY easy to post images, audio, video, or text you find on web pages. Also creates "via" links giving credit to sources. It make particularly nice and easy to grab stuff from other posterous blogs.