Curb is a ruby binding for libcurl. We’ve had sporadic issues with Net::HTTP, which this might aleviate via native dns, native timeouts, performance improvements, etc. It wouldnt be hard to re-implement ActiveResource, rfacebook, myspace-ruby, etc to use it instead. Anyone using this already?

sudo gem install curb

require 'rubygems'
require 'curb'
require "net/http"
require 'benchmark'

iterations = 40
Benchmark.bm do |x|
  x.report("curb") do
    iterations.times do
      c = Curl::Easy.perform("http://www.google.com")
      #puts c.body_str
    end
  end
  x.report("net/http")  do
    iterations.times do
      http = Net::HTTP.start("www.google.com")
      req = Net::HTTP::Get.new("/")
      res = http.request(req)
      #puts res.body
    end
  end
end

             user     system      total        real
curb      0.010000   0.030000   0.040000 (  4.019197)
net/http  0.140000   0.110000   0.250000 (  4.155106)