I'd have a single master process monitoring the queue in a tight loop. As soon as there is a new record to deal with, the master process would spawn a worker to perform the desired tasks. Spawned processes can only deal with the record that they have been allocated. If a spawned process can not handle the task, it alerts the master process, who will reallocate the task as required

Of course, a lot of this comes down to how much resource you've got. You don't want to spawn more processes than the server can handle. You may wish to precreate a finite pool of workers if resources are a problem