Daisetsu's questions

I have two webservers colocated in the same place. Currently only 1 is active and it hosts a online forum, but it's biggest use by far is serving large binary files to a couple hundred thousand people and responding to automated update checks. Users reported that there have been some issues so I got the second webserver to share some of the load (I'm rsyncing between the two). How can I implement an effective (simple) load balancer for these two servers? The facility doesn't offer any sort of load balancing for me.

Round robin seems ineffective and not really a proper choice.

How can I find out how much of a load my webserver is under? I tried top but I don't know how to interpret the information it's showing me for CPU. While top may give me the CPU usage I also need to find out the bandwidth (load on the NIC) to see if the server is being overwhelmed or not. I tried netstat but all I could see is what the active connections are.

I don't know much about serve maintenance, I'm a programmer and my sysadmin is on jury duty. Any hints are much appreciated.

I'm running Apache on Ubuntu server, with a few small PHP scripts. The majority of the traffic is some large binary files which are being downloaded.

I have a single blade server to work with (8 CPUs, decent bandwidth, running apache). Users will be connecting to the server to download a single file (either the 5mb or the 70mb version). What can I do to make the server not melt under the load?

The users will first access a PHP file which will determine if they can access the file or not, and if the script passes then they will download the file. I'm just wondering what I can do to make sure that not all the slots fill up and people end up getting timeouts.

I'm anticipating max 10,000 downloads a day. Would a decent blade server be able to handle this?

I need to check a PTR record to make sure that a script I have is sending emails which will actually be received by my users and not be incorrectly marked as spam.

I understand that the ISP which owns the IP range has to set up the PTR record, but how do I check if it is already set up?