maybe we can discuss this one a bit more. is there a reason outside of testing to use this approach? this method overrides one in the JobProcessor class so I'm hesitant to add params here and not in the parent, and I'm also hesitant to add params to the parent strictly for the benefit of testing a particular child since the outer worker process which calls this will never pass anything in here.

some interesting discussion along these lines: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6034662/python-method-overriding-does-signature-matter

if this is just for testing, I believe we can manipulate the CONF from the test to inject different values if necessary (would probably be good tests to add!)

one more thing tho - I've been trying to decide if these *particular* settings are generic enough that putting them and the associated _try_update method on the worker or maybe the parent JobProcessor (more likely on the worker with a helper in the processor) rather than the child processor directly may make more sense anyway