Rails controllers, safe to fork a block and then return?

Short and simple que开发者_高级运维stion:

fork { something_that_takes_a_few_seconds_and_doesnt_concern_the_user }

respond_to ...

Is there any reason not to do this sort of thing in a rails app? In PHP we're currently relying on external queueing systems like beanstalk or Amazon's SQS coupled with an asynchronous task worker that's pulling things off the queue to run in the background. A simple fork would fit better in many cases, depending on the complexity of the task.

Yes, if you get too many requests or this process takes longer than expected you can easily blast your CPU and memory and the Rails app is going to start raise out of memory errors.

There are many dead simple background workers solutions for Rails apps, like Resque, and you can benefit greatly in using such a solution instead of forking, as it would always happen out of your webapp environment and even if something nasty happens it would be confined to the worker machine (and not your application server).

Also, I've seen a lot of people saying that once you move to a virtualized word, memory fragmentation (due to spawning and killing many processes) might take their toll and make you go slower.