Comment by pas

...well, that's good for scaling the queue, but this means the worker needs to load all relevant state/context from some DB (which might be sped up with a cache, but then things are getting really complex)

ideally you pass the context that's required for the job (let's say it's less than 100Kbytes), but I don't think that counts as large JSON, but request rate (load) can make even 512byte too much, therefore "it depends"

but in general passing around large JSONs on the network/memory is not really slow compared to writing them to a DB (WAL + fsync + MVCC management)