Thanks a lot for your reply. "ataylor" wrote : With JBM 1.4 it is possible to specify the earliest time that a message will be delivered. The user manual explains how to do this, but here you are anyway. If I understand this correctly I'd this way "schedule" by "calculating" when I do expect the just about to be send message being processed. This would mean: - Queue shall be allowed to deliver messages between, e.g., 9pm and 5am - "Pre-Processing" starts at 9:30pm - "Pre-Processing" now has to count and calculate, which messages can be send without any "earliest time" (or current time), because they're expected to be processed before 5am and send the rest with a timestamp of next, or even later, night. If I understood this right this is not exactly what I'm looking for. I'm more interested in something that only "halts" the queues delivery attempts. If not automatically, but only by calling some MBean-operation I'd be fine. Background is: pre-processing will be done in a much shorter amount of time than real message processing. Therefore one pre-processing run will generate a few million of messages which should be started to process. This will be finished within the time frame of one night. But than, at a defined time in the morning all message *deliveries* should be stopped and the messages kept "on hold". Next evening, e.g. 9pm, I want to "unrelease" the queue and continue processing messages. This should continue until the queue is empty. I need the servers resources during work-time for business logic execution and want to process the lower priority "mega batch messages" during "night-shift" asynchronously. Any help appreciated, thanks a lot :-) -- Regards, P. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4171337#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...