SQL Server Memory consumption (7GB)

My development machine started to run at snails speed with just a single instance of Visual Studio and SQL Server 2014 running. I have 8 Cores and 16GiB memory. 

The memory consumption was around 15.3GiB and it was hovering around the same figure continuously. 

Sql Server 2014 memory consuption

After hours of research I noticed that I had Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) service stopped and disabled.

Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) in operation

After restarting DTC service and restarting SQL Server, the memory consumption simply dropped to 7 GiB in total. 

Always check DTC Service if memory consumption with SQL Server is way over the top.

AWS: The specified queue does not exist for this wsdl version (.NET)

One of the demo applications I was working on suddenly started failing with the above error message.

This issue occurred when the AWS .NET SDK was used. Following is a list of pointers that might help you debug the issue. In my case it was the region information that somehow got lost!.

• Log into the AWS Console and see whether the queue is present. This is a trivial check. However make sure to check region (e.g. EU Ireland, US West etc). The region is very important because queues are tied to the region you create them.

• Then ensure you are using the correct fully qualified queue name. The fully qualified queue name includes the ARN (Amazon Resource Name) followed by the account number and the queue name.

Fully qualified queue name

Once the above checks are confirmed you will need to ensure the code is using the same details. Normally about details are specified in the app.config (or web.config) file.

Specifying region using app-settings keys

The region details are specified in the following format:

Specifying the app settings (old style)

Alternatively, the more modern approach is through the custom app setting section.

Specifying region details through custom config section

Last resort

Once all the above steps/verification have been exhausted, you need to manually specify the region information in the code. See the following code snippet. 

The region endpoint is a property of the "Config" object and this can be set to the "RegionEndpoint" enumeration. 

The above code was the solution I used even with the fully qualified queue name is set in the app.config. Pretty odd in my book!!

Playing around with Amazon SQS (3) - sending messages

The previous posts illustrated the steps that are advisable for setting up the environment for an SQS application.

It is time to write some code!

The AWS toolkit for Visual Studio

The folks at AWS have been very kind to provide an amazing API coupled with a document and an toolkit for Visual Studio. The first task is to download and install the AWS toolkit for Visual Studio. This toolkit is similar to the services available in the AWS Console.

AWS toolkit for Visual Studio

The highlighted areas in the screen capture is quite important. 

The "profile" directly links to the secret key and access key. Profiles allow developers to access access keys securely rather than storing them in source control (app.config file). 

Normally AWS services are created in a region. The queue "MyQueue" was created in the Ireland region hence using the EU West as the region name. 

Refer to this link for more information.

Adding NuGet packages

The NuGet packages for .NET SDK are now streamlined for each AWS service. This makes the AWS assembly small. Here is a great link around the motivation to modularise the SDK.

Adding AWS SQS NuGet package

* Note that the NuGet package is still in preview (hopefully not for too long!)

Sending messages

The "Amazon.SQS.AmazonSQSClient" class is the entry point to SQS. Once an instance is created, the "SendMessage" or its async counterpart "SendMessageAsync" is used to send messages.

Consider the following sample code.

One of the questions that might arise here "how do you specify the account to use?". This is specified in the app.config file.

There is no explicit mention of an account but a "profile" is used to access the service. 

The messages appear in the AWS console once the above code is executed.

Messages in AWS console

OK, the messages are in AWS now, so how to receive these? That is the topic of the next post!