Share via

How big is an MSMQ message in the outgoing queue?

  • Article

There's always something you didn't know you didn't know.

For example, learning about the extra columns in Computer Management for MSMQ.

From the View menu, select "Add/Remove Columns..." and move "Message Quota Used" to the right hand side.

Bingo - you can now see total message sizes (as opposed to just that of the message body) in outgoing queues.

In the screenshot below you can see I have sent 10 non-transactional and 10 transactional messages. Each message has a payload of 100,000 characters - which take up 200,000 bytes as they are stored as double-byte Unicode.

The non-transactional messages have a message header of 252 bytes each while the transactional messages have a greated overhead of 276 bytes to accommodate the extra sequencing data.

Sadly this information is not available on the destination queues, only the outgoing queues.