Outbound HTTP throttling

Hi -

At our company, we make use of a lot of "web APIs" that exist.  For example,
Google has a search API, Netflix has an API, etc.  Using these APIs, we can
create a lot of "mashups" or richly integrated data sets.

However, we would like to be a "good Internet citizen" and obey the rate
limiting requirements of the sites we hit.  For example, many companies have
rate limiting policies like "no more than 5 requests per second".
Unfortunately, since we have many machines that - for several different
applications - hit these sites, we need to make sure that our *aggregate*
use is no more than 5 (or whatever) requests per second.

I'm writing to this list because I believe there may be load balancers with
L4 or L7 capabilities that allow us to do this and I was looking for
suggestions.  We are in the process of testing out Citrix NetScaler for this
and, although it seems somewhat capable, it's been very tricky to configure.

To re-iterate the complexity of our particular problem, it has to do with
rate limiting outbound traffic based on number of connections/requests per
second.

If anyone has any insight into solutions that do this (h/w or s/w), I would
appreciate it.

For the record, I know there are software solutions like like Apache
mod_throttle and mod_cband, Linux iptables, Squid, Vista Server QoS, etc.
I'm open to any of these provided it's straightfoward to manage.  I would
prefer the reliability of solid state, but my first priority is any kind of
solution, reliability can be an "optimization".

Thanks for any and all help,
--kv

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