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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T10:15:55+00:00

I’m writing a high load application that uses SQL Server Service Broker. I have

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I’m writing a high load application that uses SQL Server Service Broker. I have got to a state where running the following script in Management Studio takes 1 minute 6 seconds, even after I have stopped the application. What could be causing it to take so long? I thought the TIMEOUT would make it stop after half a second?

WAITFOR (RECEIVE TOP(1) * FROM [targetqueuename]), TIMEOUT 500;
SELECT @@ERROR;

@@ERROR is returning 0. After the first run taking this long, subsiquent runs are returning instantly.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    WAITFOR(RECEIVE), TIMEOUT works by actually running the RECEIVE at least once. If the result set is empty, it continues to wait. Every time it believes that it can succeed (it gets notified internally that more messages are available) it runs the RECEIVE again. Repeat in a loop until either it returns rows or it times out.

    But the timeout does not interrupt a RECEIVE already executing inside this loop. If the RECEIVE is taking long to find messages in the queue (can happen with large queues or with bad execution plans for RECEIVE) then the timeout cannot be honored. Note that this can be the case even if the RECEIVE does not find any message, since the queue may contain a large number of messages all locked (more precisely all belonging to locked conversation groups). In this case the RECEIVE may take a long time to execute, searching for unlocked conversation groups and in the end still come empty handed.

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