You can use something called a selective receive. The basic idea is to just pattern match on the priority message first and the rest of them later. There are some drawbacks doing this especially for large mailboxes. Also note, that you must do this in your own processes and can’t use GenServer behaviour (as far as I know).

Some links I found.

• https://medium.com/@ErlangSolutions/receiving-messages-in-elixir-or-a-few-things-you-need-to-know-in-order-to-avoid-performance-issues-2b3ce2bf84d8
• https://learnyousomeerlang.com/more-on-multiprocessing (erlang code)
• http://ndpar.blogspot.com/2010/11/erlang-explained-selective-receive.html (erlang code)

If you google for selective receive you may found more information.

An example:

def check_important_messages_first() do
    receive do
        {:important, message} ->
           do_something_imporant(message)
    after 0 ->
        receive do
          {:important, message} ->
              do_something_important(message);
         {:normal, message} ->
              do_something_else(message)
      end
   end
end

I dunno efficiency of this solution, but here’s idea: receive all messages and store it in priority queue, then process them one by one from this queue. Higher priority events will appear first to be processed.

GenServer’s process in order, that is the purpose of their design.

There are alternative GenServer’s out in the erlang world (and thus useable via Elixir) that are Priority based genservers, so you can send messages and process them in different orders (first by priority then by received order).