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← ~/writing · September 18, 2026 · 1 min read

Why my Laravel queue stopped dropping jobs

A timeout shorter than the retry window, and how we found it.

For two weeks a small share of report jobs disappeared without an error.

The cause

The worker timeout was shorter than retry_after, so a slow job was picked up twice and the second copy failed silently.

The fix

  • timeout below retry_after

  • Idempotent job keys

  • An alert on failed_jobs growth

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