If you have a lot of events and other logic that triggers the use of the que WF_DEFERRED there could be a need of create an additional index on the que table. When you have many rows in WF_DEFERRED the deque process is so slow that it blocks other incoming messages.
Follow note CPU Intensive Querries Due To FTS on WF_DEFERRED [ID 463242.1].
Our scenario:
We had about 3.5 million rows in WF_DEFERRED that where dequeuing very slowly, about 2 per minute. After creation of the index all records where dequed in about 30 minutes.