ruby working on array elements in groups of four

You can enumerate in groups of 4 for an array:

>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12].each_slice(4) {|a| p a}
[1, 2, 3, 4]
[5, 6, 7, 8]
[9, 10, 11, 12]

So you can try something like

elements.each_slice(4) do | batch |
    batch.each do | element |
        threads.push(Thread.new{process(element)}}

    end
    (do stuff to check to see if the threads are done, otherwise wait )
end

Its may not be what you need, though – I have been up since 3 AM and I only had a couple of hours sleep. :/