An apparatus for managing data messages comprises: one or more producers generating data streams containing data messages of varying sizes that required processing; one or more consumers for processing the data messages; a multi-message queues sub-system for queuing data messages having different processing time durations; a rate limiter for discriminating data messages based on processing speed for queuing the data messages in one or the other message queue of the multi-message queues sub-system; a fair dispatcher for dispatching the data messages to one or more consumers according to their processing statuses to maximize the processing capacity of the apparatus; and a task splitter for splitting data messages that are deemed too large.