Interesing post from igvita on Ruby Proxies for Scale and Monitoring discussing the use of Ruby and EventMachine to create simple proxies for monitoring, benchmarking, content examination, and even request modification.

I’ve always wanted to do benchmarking as Ilya suggests. Real production traffic is the best way to test. Good stuff.

I’m tempted by the beanstalkd use case as well – he uses his proxy to detect and route certain requests to an archiving mysql instead of to his beanstalkd instance. I’m leary of maintainability issues however – I’ve generally found indirection, particularly at wire protocol level, can quickly lead to hard to find bugs.

Something to experiment with at some point.