This is a companion paper to Li and Zhao (2009) recently published in Queueing Systems, in which the classical preemptive priority queueing system was considered. In the current paper we consider the classical non‐preemptive priority queueing system with two classes of independent Poisson customers and a single exponential server serving the two classes of customers at possibly different rates. A complete characterization of the regions of system parameters for exact tail asymptotics is obtained through an analysis of generating functions. This is done for the joint stationary distribution of the queue length of the two classes of customers, for the two marginal distributions and also for the distribution of the total number of customers in the system, respectively. This complete characterization is supplemental to the existing literature, which would be useful to researchers.
