Confirming that a queue is empty - Amazon Simple Queue Service
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Confirming that a queue is empty

In most cases, you can use long polling to determine if a queue is empty. In rare cases, you might receive empty responses even when a queue still contains messages, especially if you specified a low value for Receive message wait time when you created the queue. This section describes how to confirm that a queue is empty.

To confirm that a queue is empty (console)

  1. Stop all producers from sending messages.

  2. Open the Amazon SQS console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/sqs/.

  3. In the navigation pane, choose Queues.

  4. On the Queues page, choose a queue.

  5. Choose the Monitoring tab.

  6. At the top right of the Monitoring dashboards, choose the down arrow next to the Refresh symbol. From the dropdown menu, choose Auto refresh. Leave the Refresh interval at 1 Minute.

  7. Observe the following dashboards:

    • Approximate Number Of Messages Delayed

    • Approximate Number Of Messages Not Visible

    • Approximate Number Of Messages Visible

    When all of them show 0 values for several minutes, the queue is empty.

To confirm that a queue is empty (Amazon CLI, Amazon API)

  1. Stop all producers from sending messages.

  2. Repeatedly run one of the following commands:

  3. Observe the metrics for the following attributes:

    • ApproximateNumberOfMessagesDelayed

    • ApproximateNumberOfMessagesNotVisible

    • ApproximateNumberOfMessagesVisible

    When all of them are 0 for several minutes, the queue is empty.

If you rely on Amazon CloudWatch metrics, make sure that you see multiple consecutive zero data points before considering that queue empty. For more information on CloudWatch metrics, see Available CloudWatch metrics for Amazon SQS.