[Ruby] Preforking server module?

[James Moore]

I'm in need of a preforking server module.  I'm a little surprised that none
of the Rails server bits seem to offer a forking mode.  Am I just missing
something obvious?

I need to listen on a particular port for bidirectional non-HTTP
connections, so doing something like mod_proxy +
multiple_mongrel_servers_running_on_different_ports doesn't do the trick.

I'm also just a bit confused about the point of spawning off a bunch of
threads in Mongrel, given that Rails isn't thread-safe.  Seems like this is
only useful when you're not running behind apache/whatever?

 - James