jcookems
commented
11 years ago Actually, upon closer reading of the Service Bus Pricing FAQ, it looks like polling does incur a cost:
Null messages delivered by the Service Bus in response to requests against an empty queue, subscription, or message buffer, are also billable. Thus, applications that poll against Service Bus entities will effectively be charged one message per poll.
It looks like now the polling logic goes as fast as it can, one poll after another, which could cost much more than $10 a month even if nothing is happening.
christav
glennblock
Consider a scenario is where you have lots of tiny messages, and the latency is not a bit issue. Then you might want to increase the batch time from 1/4 of a second to 1 minute, because messages sent to or delivered by the Service Bus are billed at $0.01 per 10,000 messages. Sending constantly every 0.25 seconds means $10 a month for sending alone, another $10 to read those messages back; batching to send every minute would reduce the cost to $0.08 total.
Another scenario where traffic is bursty; usually no traffic, then periods of an hour or so where there is a lot of traffic. A customer might want to implement a peek algorithm that polls less frequently if it gets no messages, then ramp up polling where there are messages. I don't think there is a cost benefit here, but it feels like the right thing to do.