Stop One User From Hogging Your Laravel Queue

Yan Gus — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 09:32:47 +0000

The Problem I Ran Into

I was building an AI image generation service. Users submit prompts, jobs go into
a Laravel queue, workers process them. Simple enough - until one power user
submitted 50 jobs at once.

Result? Everyone else waited. The queue was FIFO, and that one user owned it.

Queue: [A1][A2][A3]...[A50][B1][B2][C1]
User B and C wait for ALL 50 of User A's jobs to finish.

I needed fair distribution - not "first come first served", but "everyone gets
a turn". That's what laravel-balanced-queue does.

How It Works

The package splits the queue into partitions (one per user/tenant) and rotates
between them:

Partition A: [A1][A2][A3]...[A50]
Partition B: [B1][B2]
Partition C: [C1][C2]

Execution: A1 → B1 → C1 → A2 → B2 → C2 → A3 → ...

Three strategies available:

round-robin (recommended) — strict A→B→C→A→B→C rotation
random — stateless, great for high load
smart — boosts smaller queues, prevents starvation

Plus concurrency limiting per partition - e.g., max 2 AI jobs per user
simultaneously, while other users keep running.

Setup in 4 Steps

Install:

composer require yangusik/laravel-balanced-queue
php artisan vendor:publish --tag=balanced-queue-config

Add connection to config/queue.php:

'balanced' => [
    'driver' => 'balanced',
    'connection' => 'default',
    'queue' => 'default',
    'retry_after' => 90,
],

Create a job:

use YanGusik\BalancedQueue\Jobs\BalancedDispatchable;

class GenerateAIImage implements ShouldQueue
{
    use BalancedDispatchable; // Instead of standard Dispatchable

    public function __construct(
        public int $userId,
        public string $prompt
    ) {}

    public function handle(): void
    {
        // AI generation logic
    }
}

Dispatch:

// $userId is auto-detected as partition key
GenerateAIImage::dispatch($userId, $prompt)
    ->onConnection('balanced')
    ->onQueue('ai-generation');

Run your workers as usual - no changes needed:

php artisan queue:work balanced --queue=ai-generation

Partition Keys

The trait auto-detects $userId, $user_id, $tenantId, $tenant_id as
partition keys. For custom logic:

public function getPartitionKey(): string
{
    return "merchant:{$this->order->merchant_id}";
}

Or set it at dispatch time:

MyJob::dispatch($data)->onPartition($companyId)->onConnection('balanced');

Monitoring

Built-in live monitor:

php artisan balanced-queue:table --watch

+------------+--------+---------+--------+-----------+
| Partition  | Status | Pending | Active | Processed |
+------------+--------+---------+--------+-----------+
| user:456   | ●      | 15      | 2      | 45        |
| user:123   | ●      | 8       | 2      | 120       |
| user:789   | ○      | 3       | 0      | 12        |
+------------+--------+---------+--------+-----------+
  Total: 26 pending, 4 active - Strategy: round-robin | Max concurrent: 2

Also supports Prometheus + Grafana via built-in HTTP endpoints, and
Laravel Horizon for worker management (with some caveats - pending job
count won't show in Horizon's UI due to the different Redis key structure).

When to Use This

Perfect for multi-tenant apps where:

Users submit batch jobs (AI generation, report exports, video processing)
You need fair resource sharing across tenants
Some users consistently submit more work than others

Not ideal if you need strict priority queues or real-time SLA guarantees per user
(though you can build that with a custom Strategy).

DEV Community: Yan Gus