That's totally true. And as I said in another comment I have come up against this exact problem and had considered switching to Node.js to fix it. But when it

That's totally true. And as I said in another comment I have come up against this exact problem and had considered switching to Node.js to fix it. But when it comes down to it, hacking Rails to do async requests is going to teach me a lot about how Rack and Thin work, so that's why I'm continuing to push in that direction.