Using fork in Ruby on Rails for creating parallel process

Question

I have a Rails 3 app in production with Passenger on Apache. I have this code:

class Billing < ActiveRecord::Base
  after_save :sendEmails

  private
    def sendEmails
      fork do 
        UserMailer.clientBilling(self.user, self).deliver
      end
    end
end

In localhost, when the app creates a billing, after it is saved, the app sends an email to the user, everything works fine. But in the server, after the app creates a billing, it throws me errors related to the gem MySQL2, errors like "MySQL server has gone away" or "Connection lost", and the app doesn't send the emails. If I remove the fork it works fine, but I want to use fork, I want to create a separated process because it takes to long when sending emails. What could be the problem?