I am using rails 1.0.0 on os x, and I can't help but notice that
whenever I post a new request to my rails appsvr (webrick or
lighttpd/fcgi), it looks like my ~/.irbrc is reexecuted (I noticed that
bcoz I defined a constant in my .irbrc and the 'constant xxx already
defined' message keeps poping up in my rails log)

This got me thinking: I hope webrick (or lighttpd/fcgi) doesn't start a
new ruby process whenever I ask for a new page ? (like some good old
cgi)

Maybe somebody can shed some light as to how requests are handled
there:
- Is there a single ruby process which just spawn new threads whenever
a new request comes in (probably using a thread pool) ?
- If this is the case, any reason why my ~/.irbrc keeps being executed
?
- if this is NOT the case, how is session data maintained between two
page requests ?

thanks
-Didier