Queue worker idles if first record has 255 attempts

[bilogic]

Laravel Version

12.52.0

PHP Version

8.4.17

Database Driver & Version

8.0.37

Description

I have 11 records in the jobs table, but running the queue worker, it sits there idling, as though there are no jobs to process.

Steps To Reproduce

1. Stop the queue workers
2. Create some jobs (3-4 will be good) to add some records to jobs table
3. Modify the first record's attempts to 255
4. Run php artisan queue:work, worker starts and does nothing

Expected behavior

1. I expected the queue worker to terminate with some error instead of idling
2. Because it idles, there are no signs of problems and jobs accumulate in the jobs table and none of them gets processed until someone realizes things are not happening

[dxnter]

attempts is an unsigned tiny integer, so when the worker tries to reserve the job by incrementing attempts to 256, the database update fails and the transaction rolls back. Since getNextAvailableJob() always selects the lowest ID first, the worker keeps picking the same broken job, blocking all other jobs behind it.

A possible fix could be catching the QueryException in pop(), but that's broad and could swallow unrelated database errors:

public function pop($queue = null)
{
   $queue = $this->getQueue($queue);

   return $this->database->transaction(function () use ($queue) {
       if ($job = $this->getNextAvailableJob($queue)) {
-            return $this->marshalJob($queue, $job);
+            try {
+                return $this->marshalJob($queue, $job);
+            } catch (QueryException $e) {
+                $this->deleteReserved($queue, $job->id);
+
+                return null;
+            }
       }
   });
}

[bilogic]

Another thought is that, since attempts cannot be incremented, perhaps the job should fail.

I also figured out how it managed to reach 255 attempts: the project could not connect to redis.

[github-actions]

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