Actually, aD first ran our Postgres port, not the Oracle version (OpenACS, not ACS Classic using our new vocabulary) with mod_aolserver, so we know it will work.
I would think mod_aolserver implements persistent database connections , otherwise it would be useless for any serious work. So that shouldn't be a problem.
mod_aolserver's still not ready for prime time, though, I'd wait awhile before getting too eager to put it on a production system. As of last week Rob Mayoff (one of the two implementors) said it was still in a preliminary state.
While you're waiting, you might as well give AOLserver a try. Don't worry, you won't get cooties from downloading it. You might even like it, as Roberto points out.
It's not clear why you'd be more confident running Apache from a reliability or performance point of view. The hard part about writing a very high-performance web server is to get the multithreading stuff right, and AOLserver's been multithreaded from the beginning, which was several years ago. Apache's threaded server is finally available for alpha test only.
The AOLserver folks were also the first to realize that built-in persistent database connections were important - in other words, they were the first to realize that the most useful web sites would be built on database engines and that efficient connectivity was crucial.
Apache's widely used, but has been somewhat glacial in recognition of these two important points.
As far as security goes, IMO the AOLserver development team seems obsessed with security, and have taken out some of the more user-friendly stuff (like web admin pages) that are potentially insecure. This is due to the fact that AOL's website and Digital City both run on AOLserver, I should think. Not everyone likes AOL (a sentiment easy to understand) and I imagine folks try to hack into their web sites far more frequently than they try to hack mine. Or yours.
