If you're just testing play with some of the AOLserver configuration options to limit the number of threads it creates, cache memory it will use, etc etc.
Also tell it threads live for a very long time, never to kill the database connection, etc etc.
Out of the box AOLserver isn't *quite* configured in a "we can run aol.com now" mode but the default configuration is meant to be usable under fairly heavy load. The developers basic attitude is "any real webserver has a gig of RAM" ... they don't think small by nature.
That's a great help to us who write sites that are destined for heavy traffic. We can concentrate on tuning our database queries and all that, knowing that AOLserver will consume memory with enthusiasm but in return will do what it does very quickly.
One thing that OpenACS 4 does that definitely requires a fair amount of memory - we cache all query strings for all installed packages that pertain to the RDBMS in use (Oracle or PG) at start-up time.
