Message lock renewal

This page refers to the legacy Azure Service Bus transport, which is rendered obsolete by the Azure Service Bus transport built to target both .NET Framework and .NET Core. All new projects should use the new Azure Service Bus transport.

When messages are received using PeekLock mode, the receive operation becomes a two-stage operation. In the first stage, the message is locked by the broker for a specific consumer for a fixed period known as LockDuration. When the consumer is done with the message, the message is marked as completed by the consumer, indicating to the broker that second stage is finished. Default lock duration for the Azure Service Bus transport is set to 30 seconds. Maximum lock duration allowed by the broker service is 5 minutes. LockDuration is a global setting that is applied to all entities.

Occasionally, processing can take longer than the maximum allowed time for LockDuration. As a result, messages will re-appear on the queue and will be available to other consumers. Azure Service Bus transport version 7 and above supports automatic message lock renewal.

How message lock renewal works

Message lock renewal is applied only on messages actively processed by endpoints and is not applicable to prefetched messages.

Message lock renewal should be greater than LockDuration. When the LockDuration period is about to expire, the Azure Service Bus transport will issue a lock renewal request to the broker, keeping the message locked and invisible to other consumers. Lock renewal will automatically take place while the total time of the message processing stays less than the auto renewal time set by Azure Service Bus transport. The default lock renewal time is 5 minutes. Auto lock renewal will not increase DeliveryCount of the processed message.

Message lock renewal applies to the currently processed message. Prefetched messages that are not handled within the LockDuration time will lose their lock, indicated with a LockLostException in the log when they are completed by the transport. To prevent the exception with lock renewal prefetching can be disabled by setting PrefetchCount to zero.

Message lock renewal operation is initiated by the Azure Service Bus client, not the broker. If it fails after all the retries, the lock won't be re-acquired, and the message will become unlocked and available for processing. Lock renewal should be treated as best-effort and not as a guaranteed operation.

Configuring message lock renewal

The configuration of message lock renewal is done on the MessageReceivers extension of the transport, specifying the maximum period that lock renewal should use.

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var transport = endpointConfiguration.UseTransport<AzureServiceBusTransport>();
var receivers = transport.MessageReceivers();
receivers.AutoRenewTimeout(maximumProcessingTime);

For example, setting lock renewal time to 10 minutes and LockDuration set to 1 minute will ensure that message will remain locked for up to 10 minutes, but no longer. If message processing exceeds 10 minutes, the message will become available to other consumers.

How message lock renewal works

Configuring message lock renewal

Samples