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Amazon SQS Visibility Timeout: Understanding Message Processing and Duplicate Delivery

Learn how Amazon SQS visibility timeout controls message redelivery, why incorrect timeout settings can cause duplicate processing, and how to design reliable consumers.

Amazon SQS Visibility Timeout: Understanding Message Processing and Duplicate Delivery

When an application consumes a message from Amazon SQS, receiving the message does not immediately remove it from the queue.
Instead, Amazon SQS temporarily hides the message from other consumers using a mechanism called Visibility Timeout.
Understanding this behavior is important when building reliable production systems.

The Basic Flow

A typical SQS message-processing flow looks like:
Producer
|
v
SQS Queue
|
| ReceiveMessage
v
Consumer
|
| Process message
v
DeleteMessage
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