reducing check requests with same servers in many backends

[Shawn Heisey]

I have a setup doing a lot of URL rewriting.  I set up an ACL to match 
each string that I want to rewrite.  When each one matches, it sends the 
request to a backend specific to that rewrite.  All of the backends 
(over a dozen of them) have the same set of servers, each defined with 
'check' in them.

This results in a lot of traffic just for checking -- pretty much 
continuous.  It does not appear to be overwhelming the servers, but it 
does make for an incredible amount of noise in packet captures taken at 
the server.  I was able to reduce it a little bit by changing the check 
interval to 20 seconds, but it's still pretty excessive, because it has 
to check the same servers over a dozen times during that 20 second 
interval.  I do have spread-checks enabled with a value of 5.  That 
value is arbitrary, the documentation said values from 2 to 5 tend to be 
good.

Is there any way to streamline the config so that I only need to define 
the server list once, and have it only check the servers once for every 
check interval?  I'm running 1.4.18 for this, but I could run a 1.5-dev 
version if required.

Thanks,
Shawn