Rails - Feb 2006 - slow Net::HTTP within rails?

Hi,

for search integration with a lucene search server I''m using an http
post
request.
This request takes ~ 300 ms (just for the ``resp = http.post(url,
query)'''' call, where http is some Net::HTTP instance) while
the same
http request (same url, same query) in a test program outside rails takes just ~
60 ms.
I managed to reduce the time within rails by using ruby-curl, but I''d
like to
understand why the Net::HTTP call is so slow.
Any comments?

Morus