Good point about SKIP LOCKED inefficiencies with mixed-duration jobs. In PGQueuers benchmarks, throughput reached up to 18k jobs/sec, showing it can handle high concurrency well. For mixed workloads, strategies like batching or partitioning by job type can help.
While a separate "running" table reduces skips, it adds complexity. SKIP LOCKED strikes a good balance for simplicity and performance in many use cases.
One known issue is that vacuum will become an issue if the load is persistent for longer periods leading to bloat.
>One known issue is that vacuum will become an issue if the load is persistent for longer periods leading to bloat.
Generally what you need to do there is have some column that can be sorted on that you can use as a high watermark. This is often an id (PK) that you either track in a central service or periodically recalculate. I've worked at places where this was a timestamp as well. Perhaps not as clean as an id but it allowed us to schedule when the item was executed. As a queue feature this is somewhat of an antipattern but did make it clean to implement exponential backoff within the framework itself.
While a separate "running" table reduces skips, it adds complexity. SKIP LOCKED strikes a good balance for simplicity and performance in many use cases.
One known issue is that vacuum will become an issue if the load is persistent for longer periods leading to bloat.