Message queue system

Question

I am in the process of writing a message queue system.

My question is... Is it better to do this queue with files or in a database?

If I were to choose the database, it needs to check for new jobs every second and that just seems a bit of an overhead to me?

If it's files I guess you just constantly monitor the folder and execute based on that?

BR,

Answer 1

Don't reinvent the wheel.

[Edit: updated for 2014, now linking to rabbit MQ as Ayende has moved on to making document databases and not message queues but then again RabbitMQ has come on. I would not be writing this but now posts need 30 characters so I need to blabber a bit.]