Can SQS scale up to 1,000,000 queues for a single account?

Question

I need a messaging service that allows me to create a channel for each user in order to facilitate real-time notifications. If I have somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million users, does it make sense to create an SQS queue for each of these users?

According to the SQS pricing documentation it would only cost $0.40 to create 1 million queues, but would I run into scaling problems?

Also, is there a way to set an expiration date on a queue? If a user deletes their account, then their queue no longer needs to exist.

Answer 1

Creating queues is not an issue here. Polling or even long polling the queue is going to be really expensive for you. In order to process real-time notifications, you need to poll every queue, 1M of them for lets say every 5 seconds.

Based on SQS Pricing, Price per 1 Million Requests after free tier is $0.00000040 per request.

That means you will be calling the ReceiveMessage API for about:

1000000 queues * 17280 (1 day in seconds / 5 seconds) = 17280000000 times.

Which is about $6912.00 per day for the worst case scenarios.

You need to architect the solution in a better way.