Poison message

{{Short description|Computing issue where sending a message fails too many times}}

{{primary sources|date=October 2018}}

A poison message refers to a client–server model issue, where a client machine tries to send a message to the server and fails too many times (the actual amount of "too many" is variable).

The behavior toward poison messages varies - they are either discarded, create a service request event, or initiate other failure indications. The term is used mainly in Microsoft-related frameworks, like SQL Server{{cite web | url=https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sql_service_broker/2008/06/30/poison-message-handling/ | title=Poison Message Handling – SQL Server: Service Broker Team Blog| date=30 June 2008}} or Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).{{cite web | url=https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/wcf/feature-details/poison-message-handling | title=Poison Message Handling| date=30 March 2023}}

RabbitMQ also has a notion of poisoned messages.{{cite web | url=https://www.rabbitmq.com/quorum-queues.html#poison-message-handling | title=Poison Message Handling | access-date=2021-11-26 | archive-date=2021-11-26 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211126135705/https://www.rabbitmq.com/quorum-queues.html#poison-message-handling | url-status=live }}