Web User State Management and Serialization

Hello,

I am currently playing with RoR and I wanted to get State Management in. If a user just shuts the browser down and starts it up again (+ logs in), there should be anything back on the screen (anything that was there when the last response from the server arrived).

Is it a good Idea to use rubys Marshal.dump + Marshal.load [1] and then store the dumped thing somewhere? What about performance?

A user invokes an ajax action, a response is being generated - this happens very often - each time the "system" will mashal some instances.

Whats your thoughts about this?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialization#Ruby