Lighttpd

Is there a way to assign a weight to fastcgi backends? I have been asked to move some of my processes to some temporary machines, some of which aren't as powerful as what I normally use, so I set up the beefier machines to provide fastcgi backends.

What I would like to do is assign a weighting to these external interfaces so that the local machine still does some processing, but the majority of it goes to the other backends.

... now that I'm writing this, a second question comes to mind. Typically when dealing with a heavily loaded machine, you would set the bin-environment with PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN, etc. Does this also work for backends? Does the absence of that directive limit the number of requests it can send at any given time?
I'm having trouble simply handling all of the incoming requests.

Any help would be much appreciated!