Closed stream (IOError) in ruby Open3.capture3 when using multithreading with timeout

Question

I wish to run several system commands, and get the following:

1. I wish to run each of the commands in different thread under the same process
2. I wish to capture and store the output and exit status.
3. I wish to set timeout on the execution time to find if some system command is stuck.

Unfortunately the following code ends up with:

/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/open3.rb:276:in read': closed stream (IOError) from /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/open3.rb:276:inblock (2 levels) in capture3'

occasionally, dependant on threads scheduling. When changing timeout to 2 seconds, for example (or removing the timeout block at all), the code works.

Here is a sample code:

require 'open3'
require 'timeout'

def output_from(command)
  o, e, s = Open3.capture3(command)
  return o
end

attempts = 0
Thread.abort_on_exception = true
for i in 0..5
  Thread.new {
    begin
      Timeout::timeout(0.0001) {
        output = output_from('cat /proc/cpuinfo')
      }
    rescue Timeout::Error => e
      attempts+=1
      retry unless attempts > 2
    end
  }
end

puts attempts

I had tried to rescue in output_from method and close o, but it did not help as well. I get the feeling that somehow the threads shares the pipes or some variables in popen3 implementation.