"Brent Rowland" <tarod / home.com> wrote in
<005701c0bd84$96ccc9b0$84500b18@cx312780b>: 

>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Arno Erpenbeck" <aerpenbe / uos.de>
>maybe somebody can help me with this one: I wrote a prog which fetches
>pages from the web with multiple threads. However, the URLs given
>sometimes cause a network timeout:
>
>It may not be a good solution for your application, but when I wrote a
>load-testing script for my company's dynamic website, I forked new
>processes instead of starting new threads, so the operating system would
>preemptively schedule my requests.
>
>Brent
>
>
>

I would double this proposal. Looks like Arno hit a low level atomic
(network) operation which cannot be preempted by the Ruby scheduler. 
Clemens