Yesterday while debugging a crashed AOLserver4, Dossy pointed out that we shouldn't be calling ns_server on a production site. It turns out this call is not thread safe and can cause crashes. See the NOTES section of this page:
http://www.panoptic.com/wiki/aolserver/653
I wasn't aware of this. So it turns out that the monitoring page at /packages/acs-admin/www/monitor.tcl calls ns_server to display information about running threads. Furthermore I'd made a habit of calling this page frequently after a restart, to be sure that connections were being processed in an orderly way and not piling up. The act of checking for stability was causing crashes!
Anyway, I pulled that page off of production and things seem to be stable.
I've also rewritten monitor.tcl to use ns_info instead of ns_server. Dossy indicated that this should be safe, and I've browsed the sources a bit to at verify that they are not using the same code to get the information (they aren't).
The rewritten version is committed to CVS on the oacs-5-1 branch.
There's one other place in standard CVS that calls ns_server -- an unused proc called ad_return_if_another_copy_is_running. This needs to be fixed as well.
