title: Dispatching multithreaded processes in ruby 1.9 MRI?
body: <p>I have some image processing to do that involves a lot of CPU crunching.</p>
  
  <p>At the moment I have a ruby script that does the crunching, but it does so one image at a time. I'm aware I can use threads to make things sorta-kinda parallel, but in MRI, it seems that still isn't going to actually hit more than one processor(?)</p>
  
  <p>So, at the moment I'm doing the rather clumsy:</p>
  
  <pre><code>system("ruby image_runner.rb 0 1 3  &amp; ruby image_runner.rb 3 2 3 &amp; ruby image_runner.rb 6 3 3")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It works, it's much faster than threads...but it's none too pretty.</p>
  
  <p>So, is there a more elegant way to dispatch ruby processes to recruit as much CPU crunching power as possible?</p>