I'm a big fan of Amazon's SQS web services. However, I think their SQS is simply too expensive. I was doing some tests in python using SQS and created 1,513 messages in just a few minutes. Then I looked at my bill. It was $0.15 not counting the S3 fee.
$0.15 seems like a lot to me for the application I was writing. The application was designed to create MANY MANY small messages. SQS allows you to store up to 256k in one message which is pretty cool. But my app only needed to store URL's. They were all under 64 bytes. Granted, I assume most people take that 256k and intelligently handle many messages in one. For example, a photo sharing site would probably store the ID's to maybe 10-50 pictures in one message and another server would process those pictures as one job. But surely, I'm not the only one out there that would rather create 10,000 messages that are very small vs 1,000 messages that are larger? Or am I? So anyway, I wrote my own message passing class that works pretty well. It is "my" message passing system...as in, message passing for what I need. But maybe others need too? I am seriously thinking of putting it live and let people play around with it...as an experiment. I hope this post doesn't come across as spam or "trolley" because I will probably ask the PHP and Ruby guys too. My goal for "myself" would be to create a system that is at least half of what SQS charges. I know I can't compete with the giant Amazon but who knows... Anyway, if anyone has any interest please let me know. If no one cares, then I guess I will use it all for myself. hahaha Feel free to email me directly too. cbmeeks [AT] gmail.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
