The ResourcePool is a generic connection caching and pooling management facility. It might be used in an Apache/mod_perl environment to support connection caching like Apache::DBI for non-DBI resources (e.g. Net::LDAP). It's also useful in a stand alone perl application to handle connection pools. The key benefit of ResourcePool is the generic design which makes it easily extensible to new resource types. The ResourcePool has a simple check mechanism to detect and close broken connections (e.g. if the database server was restarted) and opens new connections if possible. If you are new to ResourcePool you should go to the ResourcePool::BigPicture documentation which provides the best entry point to this module. The ResourcePool itself handles always exactly equivalent connections (e.g. connections to the same server with the same user-name and password) and is therefore not able to do a load balancing. The ResourcePool::LoadBalancer is able to do a advanced load balancing across different servers and increases the overall availability by applying a failover policy if there is a server breakdown. WWW: http://www.fatalmind.com/projects/ResourcePool/