[Answer]-How to implement a Django server-side application that treats a database as a queue

I think you’re looking for a background processor/task queue such as Celery.

Basically you’d setup a task that would run every 5 minutes. Then in that task you’d pull the 5 records you want to edit. A good way to do this is to have a datetime on the model that gets updated on every save using the auto_now parameter for DateTimeField.