HAProxy is a very fast, efficient piece of software that enables you to load balance multiple servers behind an HAproxy front end. It supports tends of thousands of concurrent connections with moderate hardware requirements, whilst also being incredibly reliable.
The layer 7 load balancing software can even act as a rudimentary firewall – placed in-front of a single server it can screen requests to see if they are malformed or similar. Protecting your Apache server from overloading its CPU or exceeding it’s RAM and going in to swap is a massive worthwhile benefit.
Unfortunately the main feature that HAproxy doesn’t support, is SSL; but there are multiple ways around this which I’m sure you can explore. The official HAproxy website is here: http://haproxy.1wt.eu/
