[Question] SqsMessageProducer: Why is PublishAsync not awaited?

[tulior]

Hi team,

I'm looking at the SqsMessageProducer class in the paramore.brighter.messaginggateway.awssqs project, and I have a question about the asynchronous behavior (or lack thereof) in the Send method.

The method uses PublishAsync from the AWS SDK to publish messages to SNS topics, which is great for potentially improving performance and responsiveness. However, it immediately calls .Wait() on the returned Task, effectively making the publishing synchronous.

I'm curious to understand the reasoning behind this design choice. Are there specific reasons why awaiting PublishAsync was not implemented?

Some potential benefits of using await and fully asynchronous publishing could include:

• Improved scalability and resource utilization: Avoiding blocking threads while waiting for publishing to complete could allow the application to handle more concurrent requests and use resources more efficiently.
• Better responsiveness: The application wouldn't be held up by potentially slow publishing operations, leading to a smoother user experience.

Of course, there might be valid reasons for the current implementation. Understanding the context behind the design choice would be helpful.

Thanks for your time and insights!

[iancooper]

I would suspect that the reason is that we have not historically bubbled async operations on producers up, as they are uncommon. For example although the Kafka transport supports an async/away compatible Produce, it is better to use the "sync" produce which buffers all produce requests. SQS is a little bit of an exception as it is an HTTP call.

As we are working on V10, we can review and see if it makes sense to expose async/await compatible operations on our producers.