Lab 07 — Long polling vs short polling

Goal

Count the API calls both ways and watch empty receives disappear.

Setup

To be written — CLI commands and an IaC equivalent for every resource, all prefixed sqs-course-.

Steps

1. Run a consumer with WaitTimeSeconds = 0 against an empty queue for 5 minutes
2. Record NumberOfEmptyReceives from CloudWatch
3. Run the same consumer with WaitTimeSeconds = 20 for 5 minutes
4. Compare the two metric values
5. Send a message during the long-polling run and measure how quickly it is returned
6. Set the SDK read timeout below 20 s and observe the client-side failure

What you should observe

• Empty receives drop by orders of magnitude
• Long polling returns immediately on arrival — latency goes down, not up
• A client timeout shorter than the wait breaks every call

Why it happened

To be written — ties each observation back to the mechanism in 12 — Long Polling.

Experiments to try

To be written — deliberate variations that change the outcome.

Teardown

To be written — every resource created above, in dependency order.

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