Seems like a flaky architecture that depends too much on the internals of the web server. I would launch a stand-alone ruby process for the communication and c

Seems like a flaky architecture that depends too much on the internals of the web server. I would launch a stand-alone ruby process for the communication and connect to it via Drb to get results. Note that this will not work if you have greater than about 40-100 things trying to connect to the object, but it is simple and will work pretty well at small scales-it is less hairy than threads. Alternately, you could put rabbitmq or a messaging queue in the middle, and look at EventMachine for the communicator process. That will scale nicely.