Actually Redis is a bit more than a k/v store these days. It provides implementations of a variety of basic data structures, including lists that support queue operations. There's BLPOP[1] and BRPOP for blocking job/message requests and LPUSH and RPUSH for placing a job/message on the queue.

That said, I'd still like to see benchmarks showing Redis beating Beanstalkd. Of the two, I've only used Beanstalkd, but it's a great example of keeping things simple while still providing advanced functionality.

_

1 http://code.google.com/p/redis/wiki/BlpopCommand

Key == mailbox/slot, and value == message. All you need are concurrency primitives, and broadcasting (in the case of a distributed queue)

People have modeled message queues with far more primitive solutions:

http://www.freeopenbook.com/php-hacks/phphks-CHP-5-SECT-18.h...

A Redis based solution might not be as elaborate as RabbitMQ, but it will be very clean and straightforward, not to mention blindingly fast, and will get the job done.