performance vs msg queue length

[John Erickson]

Hello, I have noticed that the amount of work an erlang process gets done
seems to decrease as its message queue grows.  In extreme cases, this is
understandable, as when the message queue fills up all available memory.
 However, even for more moderate cases such as ~100 messages each around
10kB there seems to be significant slowdown.  These are in processes that
are not scanning the msg queue; they have a single receive block which is
expected to match every message.  Is this expected?