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MacOS icons as GIF encodings

greetings,

i'm experimenting with CL-HTTP and would like to pose a couple of questions.

1. resources (the icon kind)
i couldn't find any utilities which made it possible to serve mac-resources
as images, so i extended an existing resource package to perform the
necessary encoding. there are a couple of loose ends:

1a. color maps: a gif encoding appears to require a color-map. at least
absent one, the displayed colors aren't those intended. i've established a
usable map empirically, but it doesn't always work and i've not been able
to figure out where a "per icon resource" map is stored. (we're talking
about icon suites here.) does anyone know where such a map is stored?

1b. latency: with the server and the browser on the same processor, the first
time i request a page, the machine "stands still" for about thirty seconds:
no messages in the CL-HTTP log, no process switching possible, no netscape
comets flying, no disk activity, just stillness. is this the expected
behaviour while the server is working out its exports? this tends to happen
in general when starting up but is more pronounced if i start out with a
page which leads to searching resource forks.

1c. in order to specify the resource desired i have adopted the method of
exporting a single search url. for example, to get the :|ics8| resource
with the number 128, the reference would look something like
SRC="/Resource?ics*+128". the "*" appears because the suite, not the
individual icon is referenced.
i can write such a HTML spec by hand, but if i attempt to generate it using
NS2.0:%note-image, there's a clause which strips out queries from the url:
...
(let ((url-string (url:name-string-without-search-suffix image-url nil)))
  ...
why is this?
if my goal is to export a single url and to be able to parameterize the
response, is there ansome method which is to be preferred?

1d. per-url caching:
since i don't want to repeat generating the gif-encodings, i cache them.
in a global hash-table. does CL-HTTP have other provisions for caching
things for a url. do i / can i subclass them? i looked for examples here
but missed out.
similar caching issues arise when mapping dialogs to web pages: where does
one put the things which would otherwise be bound to the dialog (or to some
other subview)?

1e. i've started generating javascript's and would appreciate a pointer to
something which demonstrates how the event handlers work. not the
javascript as such; rather the cl-http implications.

1x. for thse who are interested, i've sent the code to J. Mallery for him
to make available.

2. process resources in general
the serving processes appear to be actively polling their TCP connections.
why is this? if i look at the process information they end up consuming a
significant percentage of the available cycles. does this have to be?

thanks,
bye,