Reading messages from a queue is usually simple at first. You create a worker, connect it to the queue, receive some messages, process them, and delete them after a successful execution. That works well for small scenarios. But as soon as message volume increases, or the processing step depends on slower resources such as databases, external APIs, file storage, or third-party services, the problem changes. At that point, reading more messages does not always mean processing better. Sometimes, it only means moving the bottleneck somewhere else. In this article, I want to show a practical example using: .NET Worker Service Amazon SQS LocalStack Docker System.Threading.Channels We will start with a simple worker that consumes messages directly from SQS. Then, we will refactor it using Channel<T> to separate message reading from message processing. The goal is not to replace SQS with Channel. SQS remains the external durable queue.…