I'm interested in seing the code/config used to benchark Celery. The default settings are not at all optimized for processing lots of small jobs, and you could easily tweak it to get a 100x speed up for that use case, e.g.:

   CELERYD_PREFETCH_MULTIPLIER = 0
   CELERY_DISABLE_RATE_LIMITS = True

Also, channels are not re-used unless you explicitly pass the Publisher, so e.g.

   publisher = task.get_publisher()
   for i in xrange(1000):
       task.apply_async(args=(i, ), publisher=publisher)
   publisher.close()

is known to be a massive speed-up for sending tasks in batch (it seems the creation of channels is very expensive in pyamqplib).