Question

I am using boto library in Python to get Amazon SQS messages. In exceptional cases I don’t delete messages from queue in order to give a couple of more changes to recover temporary failures. But I don’t want to keep receiving failed messages constantly. What I would like to do is either delete messages after receiving more than 3 times or not get message if receive count is more than 3.

What is the most elegant way of doing it?

Answer 1

There are at least a couple of ways of doing this.

When you read a message in boto, you receive a Message object or some subclass thereof. The Message object has an “attributes” field that is a dict containing all message attributes known by SQS. One of the things SQS tracks is the approximate # of times the message has been read. So, you could use this value to determine whether the message should be deleted or not but you would have to be comfortable with the “approximate” nature of the value.

Alternatively, you could record message ID’s in some sort of database and increment a count field in the database each time you read the message. This could be done in a simple Python dict if the messages are always being read within a single process or it could be done in something like SimpleDB if you need to record readings across processes.

Hope that helps.

Here’s some example code:

>>> import boto.sqs
>>> c = boto.sqs.connect_to_region()
>>> q = c.lookup('myqueue')
>>> messages = c.receive_message(q, num_messages=1, attributes='All')
>>> messages[0].attributes
{u'ApproximateFirstReceiveTimestamp': u'1365474374620',
 u'ApproximateReceiveCount': u'2',
 u'SenderId': u'419278470775',
 u'SentTimestamp': u'1365474360357'}
>>>