Adding decision logic to Apache's mod_proxy_balancer with Memcache

Question

Hi,

What I am trying to achieve is to have Apache's mod_proxy_balancer check if a request was already made using a Memcache store.

Basically:
Streaming media request comes in.
Check if streaming media has already been served with Memcache.
If so, can that streaming media server handle another request.
If so send request to said streaming media server.
If not send request to the next streaming media server in line.
Store key:value pair in Memcache.

My questions are:
Does mod_proxy_balancer already do this in some way?
Is there anyway to make Apache a content-aware load balancer?
Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated too, other software, other approach, etc.

Cheers.

Answer 1

Looking at 'mod_proxy_balancer.c'; one could, as suggested in the comments in the file, add additional lbmethods. Something along the lines of "bymemcached_t" or "bymemcached_r" where the t and r endings denote the "bytraffic" and "byrequests" methods respectively. We would do our pseudo code above and if not found proceed to the other methods and save the result in the memcached store.

In my research I came across HAProxy which does exactly what I want from its documentation using the balance algorithm option of 'uri' just not using Memcached. Which is fine for my purposes.