I'm doing some processing of AWS SQS messages and noticed that the process is network-bound.
The messages are highly-compressible large JSON content, and they were dropped into the queue without any compression on the payload itself.
Does the AWS SQS API perform compression on the wire? If optional, how can I enable it?
A Google search for AWS SQS API compression yields a bunch of information on AWS API Gateway, which is totally unrelated to my question.
SQS does not support automatic/transparent compression.
To compress messages, you'd have to compress the payload yourself (e.g. with gzip) and then you'd have to encode the compressed data with base64, because SQS supports only character data -- valid utf8 -- not raw binary data.
(Additionally it seems unlikely that you are network-bound when polling. You may need to investigate this in more detail.)