The fixes were not only about performance, but as well for stuck servers. By the mentioned cvs command, you should get the head version. The head version does not need the fixes for bgdelivery, since they are already included.
just by guessing i would not be surprised if your are not get more than 10 to 15 connections threads, since most likely, maxthreads is not used. If this is true, you don't need more db-connections.
Add the following script (from Tom Jacksons pool.tcl) to the end of your config file, which takes the old style configuration and uses the 4.5 ns_pools command.
set cfgsection "ns/server/[ns_info server]"
set minthreads [ns_config $cfgsection minthreads 0]
set maxthreads [ns_config $cfgsection maxthreads 10]
set maxconns [ns_config $cfgsection maxconnections 0]
set timeout [ns_config $cfgsection threadtimeout 0]
ns_pools set default -minthreads $minthreads -maxthreads $maxthreads -maxconns $maxconns -timeout $timeout
If you use e.g. 100 connection threads, and you load dotlrn, then you won't be able to run this in 32bit mode (2 GB). In this case, you have to go to 64 bit (necessary for everything, except the postgres server). For compiling e.g. Tcl, you have to configure with "--enable-64bit". I have no idea, what's available in debian etch in 64 bit.
In order to figure out, if a binary (e.g. nsd) or a library (.so, .o) was compiled with 64bit, try the "file" command.
maxidle and maxopen are timeout values, necessary as bugfix for ancient versions of aolserver, obsolete since a few years, but passed from config file to config file.
