Sounds like my problem:
Lately I’ve noticed my web apps are getting complicated to run. My apps no longer consist of a single web process; I usually have have one or more types of background workers to run different types of jobs and a clock process to handle scheduling. Splitting an app up in this way is great for performance and scalability. The downside, however, is that it becomes much more complicated to get the app and all of its parts running.
Does rely however on Pseudo Terminals (PTY), which isn’t available on Windows machines. Still have to find out whether jRuby allows it in some way or the other.