The difference between Load Balancers
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The main solutions for load balancing mongrels are Pound, NginX, Lighttpd, and Apache.
Dedicated server customer, you are welcome to use any of these solutions (although we recommend sticking with Apache).
Shared customers are already set up using Apache and mod_proxy_balancer, which is best in terms of speed and universal support.
Here is a breakdown of some pluses/minuses of each solution:
Pound - Extremely lightweight & fast. Does not serve ANY content. Will ONLY pass requests on to Mongrel. This means all your static content winds up being served by Mongrel, which slows things down. You also can't have any php/perl/other content on your site.
NginX - Russian webserver. Very popular. Can handle serving its own static content instead of passing it to Mongrel (assuming you use the proper Rewrite rules). Poor documentation & unusual syntax are big problems. Plus if you want to run PHP, you must do it using FastCGI (which I've never gotten to work with PHP)
LightTPD - Can serve webpages, PHP, & static content. Is lightweight, but not as much functionality as Apache
Apache - Can do EVERYTHING. Uses the most memory.
The important thing to realize is that while Apache is MEMORY intensive, that does not translate to SLOW. It is still extremely fast at serving content and proxying, as long as you have the memory available. Currently, your dedicated server is not using all it's memory, so I believe Apache is your best option. The extra memory required is a small price to pay for the universal functionality.
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