From Amazon Queue documentation My (Laravel) project uses a queue system for importing because these jobs can take a fair amount of time (up to an hour) and I want to have them run asynchronously to prevent my users from having to sit and watch a spinning ball. I created a cron job which would run my Laravel queue work command every 5 minutes. PHP is not really the best language for long-running processes which is why I elected to rather run a task periodically instead of listening all the time. This introduced some latency (which I could cut down) but this is acceptable in my use case (imports happen once a month and are only run manually if an automated import fails). The problem that I faced was that my queue listener kept popping the same job off the queue. I didn't try running multiple listeners but I'm pretty confident weirdness would have resulted in that case as well. Fixing the problem turned out to be a matter of configuring the visibility time of m...