Interesting. You're trying to do two rather separate things there,
though:
One, use TUX as a buffer between AOLserver and the client. If you
change AOLserver only such that it returns HTTP responses to TUX
rather than to the end client, and you don't change anything else,
then I guess it would work without breaking anything else. Sounds
nice and clean and simple.
Two, you're also talking about using TUX to "serve static files" and
"Pass .tcl and .adp requests through to AOLserver", and
that's a significant change in the application logic, not
just an under-the-covers implementation enhancement. For example, ACS
4.x does do access control checking on URLs that map to
static files. And then there's the Static Pages module that reads in
an HTML file and then post-processes it in order to tack dynamic
General Comments onto the end! So that fact that a file is "static"
(not a script) does not mean that you can just arbitrarily
hand over all responsibility for serving it to TUX without breaking
the semantics of your application.
So for that more intrusive feature, you definitely need some fairly
smart way to tell TUX just what it's allowed to serve directly and
what it must allow AOLserver to process, something much smarter than
just letting TUX server everything other than *.tcl and *.adp files.
Of course, by the time a site really needs more performance than a
user-space web server can give, I imagine you'd have long since
separated out your truly static, no-application-logic-involved content
(e.g., graphics) from the stuff that needs ACS access control or other
AOLserver processing. (In ACS 4.x land, this means hacking/extending
the request processor.)
Also, is having TUX serve static files going to be better than just
using nsunix for AOLserver? I thought the whole point of nsunix is
that it passes files descriptors around rather than copying actual
bytes. Or is it that AOLserver/nsunix can't pass the file descriptor
to TUX or any other part of the kernal, but must copy the bytes?
Finally, and I admit I'm curious, are you just pursuing this AOLserver
/ TUX thing as a cool research project, or do you actually have
someone who thinks that a user-space web server isn't going to be fast
enough for them?
