Hi ! After some days... (yes, it is *always* very costly and difficult) I've pinpointed a large hole in Tcl8.4.(1|2) which effectively generates bogus OS paths, corrupts memory and otherwise impairs the AOLserver (or any other MT-enabled application).
The problem is in Tcl generic/tclIOUtil.c and naive handling of static Tcl_Obj *cwdPathPtr. The pointer to this Tcl object gets shuffled arround threads by simple reference, it is read (referenced) without proper locks, etc. The implementor obviously protected the most obvious write operations, but neglected any others. Also, the Rule#1 in Tcl "Do not pass Tcl_Obj's between threads" is grossly violated. I must see how we can solve this. I'm afraid that we'd need to rewrite some parts of the above file and bump to Tcl8.4.3 or such. How come nobody has noticed this so far? Well, the problem starts displaying itself if you ever change the current directory of the process *after* the Tcl has been initialized. You need not do [cd] explicitly; some internal Tcl code does that on your behalf as well. As for AOLserver 4.0; we do need at least Tcl8.4 or higher. So, I'm afraid we will not be able to go to production before fixing this ugly thing. Cheers, Zoran -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list: http://www.aolserver.com/listserv.html List information and options: http://listserv.aol.com/
