Hi Gilles,
I have the feeling my concern about client mode and httpserver did contribute in the raising of question #1. ;-)
yes, I remembered your e-mail!
We definitely want to separate the DB mgt server is from the clients just to identify performances bottlenecks and be able to do some tuning.
I'm looking forward to your reaction on the first version of the Client Module [1], available in the latest stable snapshot [2].
Christian
[1] http://docs.basex.org/wiki/Client_Module [2] http://files.basex.org/releases/latest/