This is to announce the release of Pound v0.11. New in this release: - added the ability to track sessions by cookie value or URL parameter value, in addition to IP address. - sockets are opened with REUSE_ADDR to allow for quick restart (the socket is first checked to make sure no other program is really using them). - added code for early pruning of sessions to "dead" back-end servers. - fixed a minor problem with content-less responses. The software is at version 0.11 (pre-production quality). Further testing (especially under heavy loads), improvements and suggestions are welcome. This will probably be the last pre-1.0 release, which will only include bug fixes (not that there are any). The feature set seems to be pretty much frozen - unless someone comes up with a really good, must-have, idea. What is Pound (from the Web page) - a reverse-proxy: it passes requests from client browsers to one or more back-end servers. - a load balancer: it will distribute the requests from the client browsers among several back-end servers, while keeping session information. - an SSL wrapper: Pound will decrypt HTTPS requests from client browsers and pass them as plain HTTP to the back-end browsers. - an HTTP/HTTPS sanitizer: Pound will verify requests for correctness and accept only well-formed ones. - an HTTP/1.1 to 1.0 proxy. - a fail-over-server: should a back-end server fail, Pound will take note of the fact and stop passing requests to it until it recovers. - a request redirector - it will pass client requests to separate groups of servers, based on required URL and the presence or absence of headers (pattern matching) Pound was specifically developed to serve as a front-end for multiple instances of Zope running on top of a common ZEO storage, but can be used with any other web server. A patch for the Python source of z2.py is available as part of the distribution to allow using Pound's SSL capabilities. Pound is currently in use in several medium to large volume sites and seems to be holding up quite well. The speed is well superior to other, equivalent solutions, the configuration is much simpler and the necessary resources (CPU, RAM, disk) are much, much lower. For further information, download, etc. please see http://www.apsis.ch/pound Pound is distributed under the GPL. Enjoy and let me know how it works for you. -- Robert Segall Apsis GmbH Postfach, Uetikon am See, CH-8707 Tel: +41-1-920 4904