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Visibility Timeout

5 minutes 5 Questions

Visibility Timeout is the time period during which a message is invisible to other consumers after being picked up by a consumer from an SQS queue. The purpose of this feature is to ensure that consumers have sufficient time to process a message, preventing other consumers from processing the same …

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AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Visibility Timeout Example Questions

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Question 1

Visibility timeout in your SQS queue is set to the default value. However, you found out that some messages take much longer to process than the default visibility timeout. What is the best solution to ensure these messages do not become visible to other consumers again?

Correct Answer: Increase the visibility timeout for those specific messages.

Increasing the visibility timeout for messages that need longer processing time ensures they do not become visible again before they are fully processed. Other options do not address the specific issue of long processing messages in the queue. Long polling and delay seconds do not affect the visibility timeout.

Question 2

You are designing an application to process messages from an SQS standard queue. A few messages take longer to process, but you start losing message visibility after 5 minutes. Which approach would best ensure that messages remain in the queue and are completed?

Correct Answer: Increase the visibility timeout for those specific messages to the maximum time required to process them.

Increasing the visibility timeout for specific messages that require more time to process ensures that they remain invisible to other consumers while they're being worked on. The other options do not address the issue of visibility timeout expiring for specific long-processing messages.

Question 3

Your company is using an Amazon SQS queue to distribute tasks among multiple processing instances. It is noticed that some tasks are taking a longer time to complete, and the visibility timeout is too short for those tasks. How could the application processing those tasks ensure the message does not become visible to other consumers during processing?

Correct Answer: Call the ChangeMessageVisibility API action to increase the visibility timeout for the specific message.

By calling the ChangeMessageVisibility API action, the application can increase the visibility timeout for that specific message, to help ensure it won't become visible again during the additional processing time. The other options do not address the problem of extending the visibility timeout for specific messages.

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