Posted On: Nov 8, 2012

We are excited to announce two new features of Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) that we expect will both lower cost and increase performance for our customers.

SQS now supports long-polling, which reduces extraneous polling associated with empty receives. With long polling, receiving a message from an empty queue will no longer return immediately. Instead, SQS waits up to 20 seconds for a message to arrive in the queue, at which point it returns it immediately. You can enable long polling for the entire queue, or alternatively for individual polling requests.

You can get started enabling queues for long-polling using any supported version of the SQS WSDL, and you can enable long-polling for individual requests using the latest WSDL, version 2012-11-05. You can learn more about Long Polling via the SQS Developer Guide and SQS API Reference.

We are also launching an enhanced client in the AWS Java SDK. This extension of the existing AmazonSQSAsyncClient interface provides automatic batching of outgoing messages and pre-fetching of incoming messages.

This extension of the existing AmazonSQSAsyncClient interface enables easier batching of outgoing messages, and also pre-fetching of incoming messages.

To take advantage of the latest improvements to SQS, make sure you have the latest SDK libraries, which you can download at http://aws.amazon.com/code.

Getting started with Amazon SQS is easy with our free tier of service. To learn more, visit the Amazon SQS page.