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Using the appropriate polling mode in Amazon SQS

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Using the appropriate polling mode in Amazon SQS - Amazon Simple Queue Service

  • Long polling lets you consume messages from your Amazon SQS queue as soon as they become available.

    • To reduce the cost of using Amazon SQS and to decrease the number of empty receives to an empty queue (responses to the ReceiveMessage action which return no messages), enable long polling. For more information, see Amazon SQS Long Polling.

    • To increase efficiency when polling for multiple threads with multiple receives, decrease the number of threads.

    • Long polling is preferable over short polling in most cases.

  • Short polling returns responses immediately, even if the polled Amazon SQS queue is empty.

    • To satisfy the requirements of an application that expects immediate responses to the ReceiveMessage request, use short polling.

    • Short polling is billed the same as long polling.

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