Sidekiq workers not processing low-priority job queues

Bug Fix

Fixed Sidekiq queue configuration in Kubernetes deployment

Issue

Digest emails stopped being sent. Over 29,000 weekly digest emails queued up over 8 days without being processed.

Resolution

Updated sidekiq-deployment.yaml to explicitly specify all Discourse job queues: -q critical,8 -q default,4 -q low,2 -q ultra_low,1. The Kubernetes deployment was only processing the default queue because Discourse’s sidekiq.yml only defines queues for the development environment. Purged 28,909 stale digest emails and kept today’s batch, which processed immediately after the fix.

Impact (optional)

All low-priority background jobs including digest emails, hotlinked image processing, and topic link crawling. Affected all users who had digest emails enabled.