Manual:$wgJobBackoffThrottling

Details
Number of work items of a given job time to perform per second.

What exactly a "work item" means is up to the job; it just has to return the number of them in  .

For example, it could mean the number of pages updated for a job which does batch updates.

Whenever a job of the given type gets executed, no jobs of the same type will be started in the next ( work item count / backoff throttling) seconds.

This only affects jobs started by  (as opposed to  which only affects job started by web requests).