Setting visibility timeout for SQS when receiving up to 10 messages

Question

The ReceiveMessage call can return up to 10 messages from a queue (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/APIReference/API_ReceiveMessage.html). I am using long-polling.

I will be looping through the list of received messages and processing them in a single thread. Does this mean I should set the VisibilityTimeout for the queue to be (expected time to process single message) * 10.

Or, does SQS take care of this for me automagically? If so, I would be curious to learn about this as well, since I have not been able to find any clarification in the docs.

Answer 1

Does this mean I should set the VisibilityTimeout for the queue to be (expected time to process single message) * 10.

Yes

Or, does SQS take care of this for me automagically?

No. How would that be possible? Once you've received the 10 messages SQS has no visibility into what you are doing with them. It doesn't know what constitutes the "processing" of each message in your application. All SQS knows is that it handed 10 messages to your application.

Alternatively, set the MaxNumberOfMessages to 1 so that your application only receives one message at a time from SQS.