Azure SB paired namespace - How does syphon work?

Question

I was reading about paired namespaces on Azure Service Bus and plan to implement it in a system as a kind of failover for my queues (also planning partitioning).

As I understand, the syphon is simply my usual receivers that I set up with Microsoft.ServiceBus.Messaging.SendAvailabilityPairedNamespaceOptions.EnableSyphon. I have different receivers for different queues. Can I set them all up as receivers? Will they only receive their own messages?

I'm puzzled by this: "The syphon performs a long poll receive that lasts 15 minutes." - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn391562.aspx

Which syphon will do that? All of them? Will it really take 15 minutes? That's quite a long time for my system. One of the receivers needs messages within at least 10 minutes (5 minutes and I'll sleep better).

Answer 1

The same paragraph where you saw the 15 minute long poll mentioned also says the following: "When the syphon is actively moving messages from the backlog to the primary queue". That implies, at least to me, that all the syphon does is repopulate the primary namespace queue with the messages that were stored on the secondary namespace (backlog) queue. It doesn't sound like you can use the paired namespace as a failover location to continue processing messages while the primary namespace is down.