ok, i try once again, three rules:
(a) The easiest approach to use is to use ns_socket and friends.
(b) Don't use tcl socket operations in connection threads since this might result in lockups under high load.
The approach (a) requires the least knowledge on your side. Whether or not this is sufficiently scalable depends on your application and setup. If you care about scalability, try to guarantee short procession times in your your connection threads. Socket operations have the tendency to depend on other servers, therefore hard to give bounds, therefore scalability degrades.
If (a) is not sufficient scalable, use (c) async i/o based on tcl's non-blocking i/o in a separate thread based on the tcl thread library.
The approach (c) is used by the background delivery (as i tried to explain above), guaranteeing short processing time in the connection threads.
The *-procs.tcl files are sourced at server start time, not per usage (that would be very inefficient). Aolserver builds during startup a "blueprint" containing all library procs. This blueprint is used for initialization of every connection thread (the threads processing incoming requests). Therefore, one wants to update these procs in the threads in memory, one has to reload it explicitly via the admin interface (see above), or one has to restart the server.
