Here is my scenario.
I have a ajax call in my web site to find the elevation at particular point. Once this point comes into an action of a controller in Ruby on rails, I have to use python on command line to find the elevation.
The following sequence of commands in DOS does that for me.

python (starts a python session)
import arcpy (takes a lot of time)
function call (very fast).

Now if I put this into a script and run it, I do get the result, but its very slow, because the 'import' step takes a lot of time. But the actual function takes less than a second. 
As all this is suppose to happen behind an Ajax call on ror web site, such a large delay is unacceptable.
Question:
Is it possible for me in  Ror to open a 'command line session' when the application loads and issue the first two commands, and then use this session every time a request comes in a controller's action, and issue the third command, and return its output?
If yes can someone please post some samples?
Thanks
Shaunak
What you are proposing could be possible if Rails was friendlier about forked processes.  A cleaner and better solution would be to write a python daemon that you could query so that you don't incur the startup penalty.  (This could be a web-service or a daemon you communicate with standard network sockets or whatever).
issuing dos commands from inside ruby on rails controller in the same dos session