We have a system which has one Apache instance in front of multiple tomcats. These tomcats then connect to various databases. We balance the load to the tomcat with mod_proxy_balancer.

Currently we are receiving 100 requests a second, the load on the Apache server is quite low, but due to database heavy operations on the tomcats, the load there is roughly 25% (of what I estimate they can handle).

In a few weeks there is an event happening and we estimate that our requests will jump significant, maybe by a factor of 10.

I'm doing everything I can do reduce the load on our tomcats, but I know we are going to run out of capacity, so I would like to fail gracefully. By this I mean, instead of trying to deal with too many connections which all timeout, I would like Apache to somehow monitor average response time, and as soon as the response time to Tomcat is getting above some threshold, I would like a error page displayed.

This means that users who are lucky still get a page rendered quickly, and those who are unlucky get a error page quickly. Instead of everyone waiting far too long for their page, and eventually everyone timing out, and the database being swamped with queries which are never used.

Hopefully this makes sense, so I was looking for suggestions on how I could achieve this.

thanks