Work that should not happen during a page load.
WHY QUEUES EXIST
Sending email, processing images, calling external APIs and generating reports all take time. Doing them during a request makes the visitor wait and risks timeouts.
A queue accepts the job and processes it separately.
ON SHARED HOSTING
Persistent worker processes are generally not permitted. A worker running continuously conflicts with the shared model.
The practical approach is a cron job that processes the queue periodically: every minute or every five minutes, run the queue worker with a time limit so it exits.
Laravel supports this pattern directly.
THE LIMITATION
Jobs are processed in batches rather than immediately. For most purposes, a delay of a minute is acceptable.
For genuinely real-time processing, you need a VPS where a persistent worker can run.
ALTERNATIVES
External queue services process jobs off your server entirely.
WHAT TO PUT IN A QUEUE
Email sending, image processing, report generation, API calls, anything slow that the visitor does not need to wait for.
