I have a website that right now, runs by creating static html pages from a cron job that runs nightly. 
I'd like to add some search and filtering features using a CGI type script, but my script will have enough of a startup time (maybe a few seconds?) that I'd like it to stay resident and serve multiple requests.
This is a side-project I'm doing for fun, and it's not going to be super complex. I don't mind using something like Pylons, but I don't feel like I need or want an ORM layer.
What would be a reasonable approach here?
EDIT: I wanted to point out that for the load I'm expecting and processing I need to do on a request, I'm confident that a single python script in a single process could handle all requests without any slowdowns, especially since my dataset would be memory-resident.
maybe you should direct your search towards inter process commmunication and make a search process that returns the results to the web server. This search process will be running all the time assuming you have your own server.
I want to create a "CGI script" in python that stays resident in memory and services multiple requests