Fair task queue for Java EE

Question

I intend to make a service where in people could submit tasks(specifically transcoding tasks) to the system and they should get serviced soon but at the same time it should not starve anyone else, ie it must be fair. If a person submits 2000 tasks the system should not cater to only him all the time but instead do a round robin or something like that among other people's requests...

Are there any solutions available? I looked at rabbitMQ and other messaging systems but they don't exactly cater to my problem. How are fair task queues implemented?

Answer 1

I would implement like this:

Have a queue listener on a queue which when a message arrives checks the last time a task from the given user was received; if the time < 1 sec put it on queue 1, if time < 10 seconds put on queue 2, if time < 100 seconds put on queue 3, else put on queue 4. You would then have listeners on the 4 queues that would be processing the tasks.

Of course you can change the number of queues and change the times to match the best throughput. Ideally you want your queues to be busy all the time.