Queues, Dead-Letter Queues and Limits
Manage queues in the portal
Open SharkMQ → your broker → Queues. For each queue you see the waiting and in-flight message counts, size, rates and consumers, refreshed every few seconds. You can:
- Create a queue, with how long to keep messages and an optional dead-letter queue.
- Peek at up to 10 waiting messages. They stay in the queue, though their order may change.
- Send a test message.
- Purge (delete the waiting messages) or delete the queue.
Dead-letter queues
A message that keeps failing should not block the others. Give a queue a dead-letter queue and a number of receives: after that many unsuccessful receives, the message moves to the dead-letter queue, where you can inspect it.
- In the portal: fill in Dead-letter queue and After N receives when creating the queue.
- Through SQS: set
RedrivePolicywhen callingCreateQueue.
Create the dead-letter queue itself too, as a normal queue.
Limits
| Limit | What happens at the limit |
|---|---|
| Connections | New connections are refused. |
| Queues | Creating another queue is refused. |
| Size per queue | The oldest waiting messages are dropped to make room. Keep consumers running. |
| Users | Adding another user is refused. |
| Messages per month | Nothing is blocked. You get an email at 80% and at 100%. |
| Message size | 1 MB (SNS: 256 KB). Larger messages are refused. |
| Retention | Up to 14 days, or less if you set it on the queue. |
Your broker's limits are on its Overview tab. To raise them, open a support ticket.