Poison messages

A message that crashes its consumer every time, for example because of malformed data. Without a retry limit it is redelivered endlessly.

Where it shows up in real systems

  • Dead-letter queue

    Without it, a poison message is retried forever and wastes worker capacity. With it, the message is isolated after a set number of deliveries and an engineer can inspect and replay it.

    In production: Amazon SQS DLQ, RabbitMQ dead-letter exchange, Kafka DLQ topic

See it break, then fix it

Build an architecture, send it a day of traffic and outages, and learn why it holds or fails. Free to start.

Open the learning path Open the sandbox