Before using Service Broker (SB), we had over a dozen Windows Services on another machine scanning tables for data to be processed. Between each scan, they would sleep for a few seconds. Once SB was implemented, these same services just hang a receive on their queues. Furthermore, rather than using the SB reader number to throttle the system, we use the thread pool on the processing server. This offloads all of the CPU cycles, or nearly so, to another server, or servers.

True, there are other methods that could be used, but we found that SB was the most secure as far as the delivering of messages. It also is the easiest to implement. I would, however, like to see a package that would provide for the monitoring of the entire SB system.