An AMQP-based background worker system for Ruby designed to make managing heterogenous tasks relatively easy. The use case for Woodhouse is for reliable and sane performance in situations where jobs on a single queue may vary significantly in length. The goal is to permit large numbers of quick jobs to be serviced even when many slow jobs are in the queue. A secondary goal is to provide a sane way for jobs on a given queue to be given special priority or dispatched to a server more suited to them. Clients (i.e., your application) may be using either Ruby 1.9 in any VM.