Laravel queue worker jobs fail when messages are sent back to SQS

Question

I have set up my Laravel application to retrieve messages from an SQS queue. Everything works fine during normal operation: Messages are added to the queue when a queueable job is dispatched, and the queue worker grabs the message from SQS and runs the job successfully.

However, I run into problems whenever I use the "View Messages" feature in the SQS web console. Here are the steps to reproduce:

• Go into the SQS web console
• Select the queue
• Run "View Messages" to get a live view of messages coming in
• After a while, stop polling
• Messages that were being intercepted are now released
• Queue worker grabs the messages but they all end up as failed jobs
• Run artisan queue:retry all
• Failed jobs now run successfully

Why is this happening? I'm running Laravel 5.2.41 on PHP 5.6.

Answer 1

I figured out what was happening:

• When messages are "intercepted" to be shown in the live view, they are taken out of the queue.
• When you close the live view, the messages are re-added to the queue. The message metadata is then updated with the number of times the message has been received.
• Since my queue worker was set to only retry once, then at this point the message has exceeded the number of retries (aka times received) and it marks the job as failed.

To solve this, I added an extra retry "buffer" to my queue workers:

php artisan queue:work redis --tries=3