2 posts tagged with "sqs"

While considering using Amazon SQS for a project recently, I was surprised at just how little SQS performance data was available on the Internet. In particular, while there's a bit of information available regarding throughput, there is very little information I can find regarding message latency.

Indeed, as long as SQS can scale horizontally, throughput is really not very important at all (within reason of course). But latency cannot usually be improved by scaling, so if latency is too high to be acceptable for any given project, then scaling is unlikely to ever change that.

As latency is so important for the project I had in mind, I decided to throw together a very small set of simple SQS benchmarking scripts to get an idea of what sort of latency (and throughput) we can expect from SQS.

PDF Alchemy is an interesting new service that I've helped to build. It's a PDF conversion service aimed at developers - that is, it's entirely API based, and not intended for end users. But what makes PDF Alchemy interesting to me, is the way it uses a number of Amazon's cloud services.

To start with, the PDF conversion servers themselves run on Amazon EC2. EC2 is an excellent match here, since it allows PDF Alchemy to easily, and rapidly, scale to handle almost any possible volume, but also to then scale back again during off-peak periods.