Martin DeMello wrote:
>  Our testing department wants a small tool that can make a number of
>  http calls simultaneously to the same server
>    
Before writing your own, you may want to take a look at existing tools like:
* http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/linux/httperf/
* http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html

If you still want to build your own, please review the last couple days 
of ruby-talk mailing list archives because there's been some spirited 
debate about fork/thread that may be useful.

-igal