Is there a limit to the MSMQ queue size?

Question

I know about the size limit for the message (4MB), but is there a limit to the queue size? Best practice limit maybe?

Answer 1

"Best practice limit maybe?"

One good test is to see how long it takes for a system to restart and become operational again. So you may want to have {{picks number out of air}} 100Gbytes of messages, for example, as a maximum limit but 100Gbytes could take {{picks another number out of air}} 30 minutes to reload. That may be way outside your SLA.

So:

1. Decide what your down-time SLA for the system is
2. Work out how many messages in storage would be needed to break SLA on restart
3. Work out how many messages the system can actually store
4. Choose lower of the two.