Using resolve-replace to fix blocking Net::HTTP requests

After some googling I found that requiring the Ruby Standard Library piece 'resolv-replace' would fix this issue. Just put this line somewhere in your app where it get's loaded at startup:

require 'resolv-replace'

I noticed only later on that my Mongrel is outdated, too, and updated it. (There were three consecutive releases around the end of Okt 07.) This also seems to fix the same issue. With different results, though. With Mongrel 1.1 things are back to a usable speed and requests aren't blocked any more. But it's still ~22 times faster to use resolv-replace, too: Requests in my locale Mephisto setup without resolv-replace:

0.061855 milliseconds on average

With resolve-replace:

0.002755 milliseconds on average

To "benchmark" this I used:

start_time = Time.now
Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse('http://localhost/something.html'))
puts Time.now - start_time

PS: Now that I started writing this blog post I googled for different keywords and it turns out that no other than Joshua Harvey blogged about the very same issue in Dec 2005. Funny, I could just have asked him about it. The world is small, sometimes. :)