The Beanstalkd tube that had no consumers for eight months

During an infrastructure audit of our legacy Beanstalkd instance, we found a tube named email-verification-reminders holding 1.8 million ready jobs. The worker service consuming it had been removed during a 2025 deploy.

# Monitor tubes for accumulating ready jobs with beanstalkd-cli:
beanstalkd-cli stats-tube email-verification-reminders
# current-jobs-ready: 1,842,019
# current-watching:   0

# In bash cron check: alert if a tube has ready jobs but zero workers watching
./bin/beanstalkd-orphan-alert --max-idle-hours=24

Monitoring message brokers on enqueue throughput alone misses abandoned queues entirely. Every broker check must verify that current-watching or consumer count is non-zero whenever queue depth exceeds zero.