Ruby on Rails : A pure-Ruby stack?

Apache httpd is a wonderful application, but I don't like being forced to use it (or lighttpd) when I'm using Rails. A while back, people thought that you had to use httpd in front of production Servlet applications, and I found that equally annoying. I did some performance testing[2] of Java-based web servers with an eye towards getting rid of Apache. It was a good excuse to dig into just exactly where the bottlenecks were, and the results turned out to be interesting. I've decided to do the same sort of thing with Rails. I'll post the final results over on Distributopia, but I'll add blog entries here as I hit interesting issues.

The abrupt transition from 77 request/seconds to 5 requests/second is a little suprising[5]. I want my pure-Ruby web service stack, and that sort of thing makes me nervous. Updates as I find out more...

Ok, all that stuff previously? Mark it "unable to reproduce." As soon as my laptop finishes drying out, I'll try again, but as of now it's going down as a glitch in the test setup.