Manages persistent connections using Net::HTTP plus a speed fix for Ruby 1.8. It's thread-safe too! Using persistent HTTP connections can dramatically increase the speed of HTTP. Creating a new HTTP connection for every request involves an extra TCP round-trip and causes TCP congestion avoidance negotiation to start over. Net::HTTP supports persistent connections with some API methods but does not handle reconnection gracefully. Net::HTTP::Persistent supports reconnection and retry according to RFC 2616.