What Is a Visibility Timeout?

A visibility timeout is a window, common in queues like Amazon SQS, during which a message that a consumer has picked up is invisible to other consumers. If the consumer deletes the message within that window, it is gone for good; if not, the message reappears for another attempt. The timeout must be long enough to cover normal processing time.

Why it matters

Set too short, a slow consumer lets the message reappear and get processed twice; set too long, a crashed consumer delays redelivery. Latchkey worker jobs run on SQS, where tuning this timeout balances duplicate work against recovery speed.

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