What exactly do you mean by "take a job in advance"? I have certainly set the prefetch limit to 1 on my queues, which I believe prevents them from taking a job

What exactly do you mean by "take a job in advance"? I have certainly set the prefetch limit to 1 on my queues, which I believe prevents them from taking a job while they are running one. One of our production applications runs 4+ hour jobs in a RabbitMQ queue without blocking and has done so for 5+ years. You do want to make sure to set the VM high water mark below 50% of RAM as the GC phase can double the used memory. If high water mark is set too high, the box will thrash swap really badly during GC and hang entirely.