Forum: Ruby on Rails How to properly setup multiple databases?

I've setup my application to connect to multiple databases, but am 
running
into a few issues in production.  I also have a few questions.

First, I'm using rails 3-2-stable, because I was running in to a 
prepared
statement bug, which is only fixed in this branch [1].  I'm not up for
using master at this time, unless I absolutely need to.

Second, the pool size for the default and non-default database is 1, 
this
is because I'm using unicorn.  Also, because establish_connection on
multiple databases does not use the pool size [2].

The issue:

I have 4 unicorn workers.  After I start the app and rapidly refresh on 
a
few pages, the default database sees 4 connections.  The non-default
database sees only 1.  And for the lifetime of the app, the non-default
database only sees one connection. I also think this is slowing down the
website.

1) What would cause the application to create only one connection for 
the
non-default database, provided I have 4 workers?  When I create a sample
app on my local machine that uses the same configs with different code, 
I
actually get 4 connections for both.  See my unicorn file here:
https://gist.github.com/3807073.  All my non-default database models
inherit from something that looks like:

class OtherDb < ActiveRecord::Base
  self.abstract_class = true
  establish_connection "other_#{Rails.env}"
end

2) What's the proper way to setup a unicorn.rb file for multiple 
databases
with `preload_app true`, since I have establish_connection in the 
OtherDb
model and need to establish_connection to the default in the after_fork?

3) Should I be looking into a different rack web server?  My queries are
sub 500ms.

[1] https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/5872
[2] https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/7019