I've been telling folks in our institution that when it takes an abnormally long time for a course import job to get processed in the queue is that it's because there are a lot of other jobs system wide going on. We have a lot of jobs stuck in our queue that eventually get processed but went much faster at the beginning of this week compared to this point in the week, and it happens every year. What I'd like to know is how far reaching this job status queue reaches in the AWS infrastructure. Is it just our Canvas instance that is plagued by this or do the other instances that share our node(s) in AWS also come into play?
Imagine that your instance of Canvas is a hungry shopper at Target. When you get to the front of the store you get into the queue that has the fewest shoppers and wait your turn. You can pick any line and you generally just go for the shortest line (unless someone has royally violated the 15 items or less policy). Target has more than 30 cash registers but usually only 3-4 of them are staffed. On Black Friday, all of the lines are open but you still have to wait a long time. The third week in August is Black Friday.