ConnectionPools and removeSelf

I'd appreciate help squeezing out a bit more performance out of my
backhand-assisted setup. I'm running a heavily-trafficked two-tier setup
(single master proxying to several slaves). I currently have
BackhandConnectionPools off on the slave servers.

My first question: Whenever I turn BackhandConnectionPools off on the master
server, all 1024 apache processes get eaten up within a minute and the
server dies. I don't think that apache is tearing down the connections in a
timely manner. Is there anything I can do to correct this? With connection
pools on, I'm still getting my apache error logs stuffed with the "connect()
time out" error messages.

Second question: I have RemoveSelf set on the master server. However, it
appears that whenever a slave server uses up all of it's apache processes,
the master server ignores RemoveSelf and tries to serve pages anyways. Is
there anyway to circumvent this behavior so that the master server will
absolutely NEVER try to serve pages itself (and perhaps redirect to another
slave server)? I believe that this behavior was raised by another user but I
don't believe I saw an answer.

Thanks in advance for any help.