Windows Azure Queue can have 64KB message content and how 64KB content is calculated?
Windows Azure Queue can have a message content size up to 64KB per message. This updated was included in Version 2011-08-18 and newer. If you are still on old version, then Windows Azure Queue will have 8KB message.
This size 64KB refers to the size of the UTF-8 encoded message. The body of the request contains the message data in the following XML format.
A message must be in a format that can be included in an XML request with UTF-8 encoding. In the following example the highlighted message-content is considered as message content and its size can go up to 64 KB.
<QueueMessage>
<MessageText>message-content</MessageText>
</QueueMessage>
So this 64kb actual message content, not the raw message length, or Unicode binary length, or base64 encoded length when sent via http content.
More Info: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd179346.aspx