If you are interested in rolling your own queue and would consider backing the queue with a postgres database then a relevant "skip locked" feature was added to

If you are interested in rolling your own queue and would consider backing the queue with a postgres database then a relevant "skip locked" feature was added to postgres 9.5: https://blog.2ndquadrant.com/what-is-select-skip-locked-for-in-postgresql-9-5/ https://blog.2ndquadrant.com/what-is-select-skip-locked-for-... assuming you are happy to serialise things as JSON or pickle then this is pretty easy to integrate with python