Does that really guarantee in-order processing, or just that messages can be picked up in order. If you have multiple consumers on your queue and consumer A picks up message x from the head of the queue then consumer B picks up message y next, it is possible for y to get processed before x. Maybe consumer A is slow (gc pause?) for some reason, and now we are processing out of order, even though the queuing infrastructure does not see it. If you truly need to guarantee strict processing order (x must complete before you start processing y) I think you may need to build that into your app. Or, I misread, which is very possible.