Amazon SQS Message Receive Wait Time Explained | Amazon SQS Tutorial

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Introduction

When working with Amazon SQS, many developers leave the default settings as they are, but this can lead to unnecessary costs and high latency. One of the most critical settings for production workloads is the Receive Message Wait Time. Understanding how this works can save your company money and make your applications more responsive.

Short Polling vs. Long Polling

By default, SQS uses Short Polling. When your application asks for a message, SQS samples a subset of its servers and returns a response immediately, even if it didn't find any messages. This can lead to many "empty" responses that you still have to pay for!

Long Polling (enabled by setting a Wait Time greater than 0) tells SQS to wait until a message becomes available or the wait time expires. This results in far fewer empty responses and significant cost savings.

Key Benefits of Long Polling

• Reduced Costs: Fewer API calls mean lower AWS bills.
• Lower Latency: Messages are sent to the consumer as soon as they arrive in the queue.
• Efficiency: Your application spends less time handling "no-op" responses.

How to Configure Wait Time

You can set the Receive Message Wait Time at two levels:

1. Queue Level: Set a default for all receive requests (Max 20 seconds).
2. Request Level: Specify a wait time for a specific ReceiveMessage API call.

Conclusion

Switching to Long Polling is an easy win for any AWS architecture. By adjusting a single setting, you can optimize your messaging system for both speed and cost. Watch the full video above for a live demonstration in the AWS Console!