Just a quickie derived from my experience with Updater. It is blindingly simple to set the process name in ruby, just set $0 to the appropriate string. Dave Thomas does an excellent job of explaining why this might be an incredibly useful thing to do. You can then see this name in the list of processes from top, though I had to use the 'c' command, and ps -f.

I have rake tasks for updater, and with this I can get a much more useful output then 12 instance of rake.