I was having a discussion about queueing background work with an ex-coworker. He mentioned that when his system comes under heavy load, one of the things that increases is job wait times, leading to fun side effects. Really, what goes screwy is all the things that depend on jobs being …

I continue hunting my SQS performance white whale and learn that SQS hangs up every 80 messages.

We use AWS Simple Queue Service a lot. But man, the tail latency really sucks.