How to create a long-lived background worker process?

What's the best way to create a long-living background worker process in Drupal 7? Queue seems to run it all in the cron process but I am reading from a blocking socket so need php to execute in a worker process...

The goal is to pull data in from the twitter streaming api, process them, and add nodes to the database, then make it available via rss feed. Anyone have a better approach for this if a long-lived background worker process is not a good idea in Drupal?

Thanks!