Explain output of tail [tube] from beanstool (beanstalkd)

Question

I'm struggling to unpick what the output from beantools tail on a beanstalk tube means exactly, specifically age, reserves & releases.

stat shows one job in this tube, but tail spits out thousands of these with the same job id:

id: 1, length: 184, priority: 1024, delay: 0, age: 45, ttr: 60
reserves: 101414, releases: 101413, buries: 0, kicks: 0, timeouts: 0
body:{snip}

Answer 1

age - age in seconds

reserves - a secondary id for this job after getting put back in the queue

releases - the reserve job that's going to get put back in the queue after this one is done

The huge numbers of reserves on the same job ID were caused by the process breaking on a timeout and not being caught - beanstalk saw the job failed and reserved it in a loop.