By default messages will be prefetched into consumers. See http://labs.jboss.com/file-access/default/members/jbossmessaging/freezone... So what could be happening is that they are going straight through the queue and ending up in the consumer. And then slowly being consumed from the consumer. Since your consumer is slow, you could try setting prefetch to a lower value (like 1). Prefetch is vital for high peformance consumers. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3981256#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...