> But this is a global parameter across all queues so this means we essentially loose the one good feature of celery for small tasks which is retrying lost tasks within some acceptable timeframe.

Oh, for this you just setup two celery deamon, each one with their own queues and config. I usually don't want my long running task on the same instance than the short ones anyway.

> We were also excited to use it's chaining and chord features but went into a series of bugs we couldn't dig ourselves out of when tasks crashed inside a chord (went into permanent loops). I just declared bankruptcy on these features and we implemented chaining ourselves.

Granted on that one, they not the best part of celery.

Just out of curiosity, which broken and result backend did you use for celery?

I mostly use Redis as I had plenty of problems with Rabbit MQ, and wonder if you didn't have those because of it.