Reusing connections is good. Restkit can maintain for you the http connections and reuse them if the server allows it. To do that restkit is using the socketpool module
from restkit import *
from socketpool import ConnectionPool
pool = ConnectionPool(factory=Connection)
r = request("http://someurl", pool=pool)
Note
By default, restkit use a generic session object globaly abvailable. You can change its settings by using the restkit.sesssion.set_session function.
Restkit provides also Pool working with eventlet or gevent.
Example of usage with Gevent:
from restkit import *
from socketpool import ConnectionPool
# set a pool with a gevent packend
pool = ConnectionPool(factory=Connection, backend="gevent")
Replace gevent by eventlet for eventlet support.