title: Amazon SQS "Receive Count" only increasing
body: <p>I'm new to Amazon SQS, but some of the figures are alarming so far.</p>
  
  <p>I've configured Laravel to queue email messages (not using a job, but just by extending a notification class, <a href="https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/notifications#queueing-notifications" rel="nofollow noreferrer">as per the documentation</a>) which are being sent by my site using Amazon SQS. The service itself seems to work fine. All the messages appear in the SQS queue of my AWS account, but the problem is that the queue just seems to be huge.</p>
  
  <p>I can't find any decent tutorials or guides that explain how to read the SQS screen written in plain English, so everything MAY be fine. That said, I'd like to make sure.</p>
  
  <p>Consider what SQS is currently saying:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Messages available: 300<br>
    Messages in Flight: 4<br>
    Messages delayed: 0</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>When I tested it when it first went live, the emails were being sent immediately. The "Messages available" was empty, and the emails arrived in my inbox without issue.</p>
  
  <p>Today the figure is considerably higher, as you can see, and it never seems to fully reach 0. In addition to this the emails are taking several hours to arrive.</p>
  
  <p>Is this normal?</p>
  
  <p>I've SSH'd into my Elastic Beanstalk instance and taken a look around.  I've manually added five background processes running <code>php artisan queue:work</code>, each consumes ~5% of the CPU. Hmm.</p>
  
  <p>If I manually run the same command (without <code>nohup</code>) I see a constantly updating list:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>[2018-04-04 20:09:59] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionAll<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:09:59] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionVIP<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:10:00] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionVIP<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:10:00] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionVIP<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:10:00] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionAll<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:10:00] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionAll<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:10:00] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionAll<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:10:02] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionAll<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:10:02] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionAll<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:10:02] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionAll<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:10:02] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionAll<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:10:02] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionAll<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:10:02] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionAll<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:10:03] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionAll<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:10:03] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionAll<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:10:03] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionAll<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:10:03] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionAll<br>
    [2018-04-04 20:10:03] Processing: App\Notifications\CompetitionAll </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Only every so often does one change to Processed, most of the time it's an endless list of yellow Processing, changing every second.</p>
  
  <p>When I view the messages in SQS, I see very high "Receive counts". Some as high as <strong>21,000+</strong>! </p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/W5eyq.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/W5eyq.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>I know that there's probably only been about 2000 email requests in total, so I don't understand how this count could get so high.</p>
  
  <p>Is this normal? It seems as though Laravel isn't deleting completed requests. (Plus it seems almost impossible to find an explanation of these numbers...!)</p>
  
  <p>Any help understand what's going on would be greatly appreciated! </p>