You are right about the push/pull pattern, in the case the publisher crashes those jobs will be lost. That could be an issue depending on the use case and would

You are right about the push/pull pattern, in the case the publisher crashes those jobs will be lost. That could be an issue depending on the use case and would be a great thing to address. If I am understanding the other notes correctly: Neither the worker nor publisher should ever really block (even in cases where M>N, N>M, publisher crashed, etc), mostly due to the async zmq bindings for node. If there are a ton of messages being sent to a single worker this worker will pull down messages as fast as it can and the rest will still be in publisher queue. If a worker crashes this is happening separate from the publisher and won't affect the queue stored in the publisher's memory