Azure Storage Queue - long time to process

Question

I need to generate quite a number of reports and a report can take about 5 minutes to be generated, large amount of data, many different sources.

The client will post messages to an Azure Storage Queue. There is a worker roles that processes the messages and generates the reports.

If I want to scale this up let's say I end up with 10 worker roles that will process the messages from the queue and generate the reports. Then I will add messages into the queue like this:

• message 1: process reports from 1 - 5
• message 2: process reports from 6 - 11 ........
• message 10: process reports from 50 - 55 (might not be accurate the range)

If my worker role 1 will take the first message and put a lock on it but the process will take 5 minutes, the lock will expire and the message will be visible again in the queue so the worker role 2 will take it and start processing it ... and so forth

How can I avoid that consuming the queue message is done only once keeping in mind that the task is a long one?

Answer 1

First of all: Using Azure Storage queues, you should be prepared for all of your operations to be idempotent: In case your queue item is processed multiple times, the same result should happen each time. The reason I bring this up: There's simply no way to guarantee you'll process the message one time (unless you check the DequeueCount property of the message and halt processing accordingly), due to unexpected events such as your role instance crashing/rebooting or your queue item processing code doing something unexpected like throwing an exception.

Next: Queue message invisibility timeout can be programmatically extended. This can be done via the queue api or via one of the language sdk's. In c# (something like this - I didn't test this), extending an additional minute:

queueMessage.UpdateMessage(message, 
    TimeSpan.FromSeconds(60),
    MessageUpdateFields.Visibility);

You can also modify the message along the way (maybe as a hint to your code, to let you know which of the 5 reports has been complete. This should help your specific issue: In the event the message gets reprocessed, you don't have to process all five reports if the message has been modified to say something like "process reports from 3-5"). Note: You can combine the MessageUpdateFields flags via |:

queueMessage.UpdateMessage(message, 
    TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0),
    MessageUpdateFields.Content);

Lastly: If you're concerned with the length of time taken to process a batch of reports, perhaps rethink why you're processing five reports in each message, vs. one report per message. You can always read queue messages in batches. This is getting a bit subjective, as there's really no right or wrong way to do it, but it's just something for you to think about.