In system software, a job queue (sometimes batch queue), is a data structure maintained by job scheduler software containing jobs to run.
A job queue is a queue (that is, a First In First Out (FIFO) collection) of tasks to be carried out at an unspecified time in the future. Workers may take on the task at the head of the queue and carry it out, returning to take another when they are finished.
This is often applied to multi-threaded programming environments, in which there are fewer threads than available tasks so tasks must be queued until a thread is available to process them.
