OK so its only a minor upgrade from 1.8.4 -> 1.8.5 but the really cool thing from a pen testing and tools point of view is that they back ported non-blocking IO from the 1.9 dev tree.

So now my Ruby network based tools got a massive performance shot in the arm. A few scripts broke and needed some tweaking but one of my scripts "fixed", I was only ever able to reliably allocate 6 threads with this script, now it is happily running 96.

Looking forward to Ruby 2.0 slated to arrive in December 2007, with the move from interpreted code to compiled bytecode running on a virtual machine ala Java. This will bring massive performance boosts to all Ruby code (including RoR) and maybe make it palatable for the enterprise if it gets the right backing.