Multiple resque workers mode creating extra processes - resque

Question

I need to start 4 resque workers so i used following command
bundle exec rake environment resque:workers RAILS_ENV=production COUNT=4 QUEUE=* VERBOSE=1 PIDFILE=tmp/pids/resque_worker.pid >> log/resque_worker_QUEUE.log
But going to web interface, it was actually starting 8 workers. There were two parent processes with 4 child processes each. Following is tree view of the processess:
ruby /code_base/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/bin/rake environment resque:workers RAILS_ENV=production COUNT=4 QUEUE=* VERBOSE=1 PIDFILE=tmp/pids/resque_worker.pid
\_ [ruby]
\_ resque-1.15.0: Waiting for *
| \_ [ruby]
\_ resque-1.15.0: Waiting for *
| \_ [ruby]
\_ resque-1.15.0: Waiting for *
| \_ [ruby]
\_ resque-1.15.0: Waiting for *
\_ [ruby]
ruby /code_base/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/bin/rake environment resque:workers RAILS_ENV=production COUNT=4 QUEUE=* VERBOSE=1 PIDFILE=tmp/pids/resque_worker.pid
\_ [ruby]
\_ resque-1.15.0: Waiting for *
| \_ [ruby]
\_ resque-1.15.0: Waiting for *
| \_ [ruby]
\_ resque-1.15.0: Waiting for *
| \_ [ruby]
\_ resque-1.15.0: Waiting for *
\_ [ruby]
Couldn't figure out what is causing extra process to start?

Answer 1

You don't want to use the COUNT=n option in production, as it runs each worker in a thread instead of a separate process - which is much less stable.
Official Resque docs:
Running Multiple Workers
At GitHub we use god to start and stop multiple workers. A sample god configuration file is included under examples/god. We recommend this method.
If you'd like to run multiple workers in development mode, you can do so using the resque:workers rake task:
$ COUNT=5 QUEUE=* rake resque:workers
This will spawn five Resque workers, each in its own process. Hitting ctrl-c should be sufficient to stop them all.
Here's the example God monitoring/configuration file that ships with Resque to run multiple processes, and here's an example for monit.