While keepalive is necessary, there are other ways to add more stability, and that is to use a reverse proxy (SQUID, Apache, nsvhr) in front of your webservers and then split the python or php portion into a separate AOLserver instance. If each AOLserver is using the same domain stem, and you cookie right, both servers should be able to see the session id cookies(, and should you cookie wrong, then a smop of IPC should get you a module that lets the two servers coordinate session ids.)
Then should your python/php server die, or when it dies, it will only take down the python/php server (until keepalive kick starts it), and leaves your other services running fine.
Side note: yes, I found the tcl-lib mime stuff wonderfully easy to use, and too slow to be of use. Without profiling it, I just suspected the tcl interpreter based mime encoding was way slow compared to some honest op codes.
