I was playing with a dualcore opteron at office this week. Thinking at because ruby Thread nature is no native (OS) Threads, multithreading actually means nothing to ruby, right? But after I saw the cluster-howto of Zed, thought a bit and do a research... service clustering even in the same machine? Because we truly have 2 cpus, bind a ruby interpreter to each one is no problem (because there isn''t communication between them). That way, we could take maximum CPU availability for each interpreter... get the picture? Oh, almost forgot, just add --cpu N when installing the service (number range from 1 to 8). Don''t have a 4-way machine here to test grather values than CPU 2 :-D This week I''ll investigate what is needed to "gracefully crash" your service and make Windows Service Monitoring automatically restart it... like a "service guardian", sounds cool doesn''t? BTW, now services stop OK, again was ruby threading nature which conflict with native (OS) ones. -- Luis