jargon

Backend & systems·Queues, streams and delivery semantics

you push the slow job onto a queue and return to the user immediately, and a worker picks it up whenever it can.

Message queue

Also calledwork queue, task queue

A buffer of work items consumed by workers, where each message is delivered to one consumer and removed once acknowledged. It decouples request latency from work duration and absorbs bursts. It also converts synchronous errors into invisible ones, so a queue without a dead letter path and depth alerting is a place for work to go and quietly die.

Commonly confused with