-Ofair disables task prefetching which will affect throughput negatively if most of your tasks run for a short time (http://celery.readthedocs.org/en/latest/userguide/optimizing...).
> This option comes with a coordination penalty, but results in a much more predictable behavior
In general, I'd much rather the greater throughput over predictable behavior. In general, I'm not watching my queue and having it be predictable isn't a very high priority.
Assuming most Celery task queue work involves network requests that can be unpredictable, I think Ofair is a more sensible/understandable default.