Apache-Reverse proxy and load balancing

Hi All,

I have a webpage loaded on server1 with authorization enabled by .htaccess, which can be accessed by http://ipofserver1/index.html. Now im planning a high availabilty load balancing in such a way that if the server1 is down due to some reason it should connect to another server. i have the second server in the same ip range of the first.

so in short if i access http://my_application.com via web browser, it should check whether server 1 is up or not if not connect to the second server and load the page there.

how to enable this? i did some google search and found that, it can be done using reverse proxy.. but couldn't find any examples matching my scenario.

I would suggest to use nginx for this task ( reverse proxy ) .
It takes much less memory and is very effective .
I've seen 10k connections through the nginx reverse proxy on single quad core with 4 GB of memory and 50% CPU load .
I don't think apache can get to 1000 connections on this hardware .