Laravel's queue system is genuinely excellent: expressive job classes, automatic retry with configurable backoff, failed job tracking, and multiple driver options (Redis, SQS, database).
The gotcha that catches most teams: the queue worker does not automatically reload configuration or code after deployment. If you deploy a code change and the worker is still running the old code, jobs will execute with the old version until the worker is restarted.
The fix: supervisor with a deployment hook that sends a SIGTERM to queue workers after each deployment. Laravel's queue workers handle SIGTERM gracefully — they finish the current job and then exit, letting supervisor restart them with the new code.
The second gotcha: failed jobs silently disappear if you have not configured the failed_jobs table. Run php artisan queue:failed-table and migrate it on day one, before you have any failures to track.
The third: long-running jobs can block your entire queue if you have only one worker. Always run multiple workers and set a sensible timeout on jobs that should not run for more than a few seconds.
— Dick Bassey | DevDick | 2022