如何在rubyqt应用程序中执行ping操作，以便GUI不会冻结？

I am writing an application, which shall work with networks. As a GUI I am using rubyqt. To determine if a Server is up I have to ping it (with net/ping). But I ran in to a problem. If the server is down, the GUI freezes for the timeout, even if I put the code in a Thread or IO.popen loop eg. I am writing an application, which shall work w