[sohooo]

Well, the mini_magick documentation mentions that the spawn of a subprocess is the main point of that library:

"Using MiniMagick the ruby processes memory remains small (it spawns ImageMagick’s command line program mogrify which takes up some memory as well, but is much smaller compared to RMagick)"

Forking isn't always bad. See http://tomayko.com/writings/unicorn-is-unix