Is it fairly certain that the memory leaks _are_ fixed with tcl 8.x and aolserver 3.3? We're running a 2.x version (I'm not sure which one) of AOLserver where I work because my boss is wary of problems with newer versions of AOLserver. The developers, especially those who've experienced the good life (?) with Perl aren't real happy with with the regular expressions in tcl 7.6. There would be some real advantages to running the newer versions of aolserver.
I've been meaning to start a thread about the pros and cons of aolserver. The subject's been hashed over quite a bit here, and I agree that it makes sense to be using aolserver at present for OpenACS, but there are some things that are not so great about it. AOLserver has very low overhead for serving page requests and database access, and it's a proven technology for high traffic web sites. But it doesn't seem to be so great for executing complex scripts. The tcl interpreter seems to be very slow in all the versions I've encountered. I did some not-very-scientific testing, (increment a counter a million times, and see how long it takes) on a couple of different versions of AOLserver on different boxes, and the results were kind of disturbing. I'll have to repeat the little test and remember to write down the results, but it was something like 30 seconds to increment the counter a million times with aolserver 3.1 on a PIII. The tcl interpreters you run from the UNIX command line that are installed on the Sun boxes we use at work also seem very slow... The one that comes with RedHat 6.2 seems to be much faster: it can count to a million in a second or two, just like the perl interpreter.
Any idea what gives here?
