IntermediateScenario
10 min

Message Queue Backlog

MessagingQueuesPerformance
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Interview Question

Your RabbitMQ/SQS queue has millions of unprocessed messages. What steps do you take?

Key Points to Cover
  • Check consumer health, parallelism, and errors
  • Investigate slow processing logic
  • Scale consumers or add workers
  • Consider DLQs for poison messages
  • Backpressure or rate limit producers
Evaluation Rubric
Checks consumer health and throughput30% weight
Finds slow processing logic30% weight
Suggests scaling workers20% weight
Mentions DLQs/backpressure20% weight
Hints
  • 💡Look for retry storms or poison messages.
Potential Follow-up Questions
  • How to monitor lag effectively?
  • How do you prevent queue overload?
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