Heartbeat seems to imply the connection is critical. Why constantly create and tear down connections using an outdated http protocol? If http messages had ids, you could still do http without the need to disconnect after each message. But AOLserver and OACS seem quite big for holding open hundreds of connections, so why do you need these components to establish heartbeat/update.
I remember AOL uses the idea of a network variable NV to spread info around, but they did it by establishing a tcp connection to each server. You could maybe write an AOLserver module that in a single thread maintained many open connections and updated, based on a simple request protocol, info available in an nsv array. You might be able to still hack away at the request processor procedure to figure out a response, but then you might queue requests to single threads for execution. That is, use a single thread to hold open connections, use dqd-threadpool to process requests, return the data to the communication thread. --Tom Jackson
