WCF / MSMQ "time-to-be-received has elapsed" dead letter queue issue

Question

I'm doing testing against some software I've written. The test enqueues messages into MSMQ via WCF at a rate faster than than my software can dequeue and process them. This shouldn't be a problem, since that is MSMQ's intended purpose, but if I enqueue enough messages to where it's taking my software more than 24 hours to process, those messages will get moved to the "Transactional dead-letter messages" queue and have their Class set to "The time-to-be-received has elapsed".

The only configurable that I can find is on the binding itself:

<bindings>
  <netMsmqBinding>
    <binding timeToLive="7.00:00:00" /> <!-- 7 days -->
...

I use this binding both when enqueuing and dequeuing and it doesn't seem to do the trick. Setting the value 2 seconds does have an effect, but setting it longer than 1 day, including to its max value (24 days) does not.

Is there another way to lengthen this time-to-be-received window? I can't find anything else to configure (when sending the message or creating the queue).

Answer 1

I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that the TimeToLive property only sets the Time-To-Reach-Queue msmq property, but I don't know of a built-in way right now of setting the Time-To-Be-Received property...

Answer 2

The timeToLive attribute on the binding itself is, in fact, the only configurable necessary. I went back through all my configurations and apparently missed a spot. From "Programming WCF Services":

The TimeToLive property is only relevant to the posting client, and has no affect on the service side, nor can the service change it. TimeToLive defaults to one day.

I've had the test running all weekend now, progressing 1,000,000 messages. Nothing has ended up in the dead-letter queue yet.