Honestly you saved yourself major possible headaches down the line with this approach.

At my work we run a fairly large webshop and have a ridiculous number of jobs running at all times. At this point most are running in Sidekiq, but a sizeable portion remain in Resque simply because it does just that, start a process.

Resque workers start by creating a fork, and that becomes the actual worker.

So when you allocate half your available RAM for the job, its all discarded and returned to the OS, which is FANTASTIC.

Sidekiq, and most job queues uses threads which is great, but all RAM allocated to the process stays allocated, and generally unused. Especially if you're using malloc it's especially bad. We used jemalloc for a while which helped since it allocates memory better for multithreaded applications, but easiest is to just create a process.

I don't know how memory intensive ML is, what generally screwed us over was image processing (ImageMagick and its many memory leaks) and... large CSV files. Yeah come to think of it, you made an excellent architectural choice.