I have a collection of EC2 instances whit a process installed in them that makes use of the same SQS Queue, name it my_queue. This queue is extremely active, writing more than 250 messages a minute and deleting those 250 messages consecutively. The problem I've encounter at this point is that it is starting to be slow, thus, my system is not working properly, some processeses hang because SQS closes the connection and also writing to remotes machines.
The big advantage I have for using SQS is that 1) it's very easy to use, no need to install or configure local files, 2) it's a reliable tool, since I only need a key and key_secret in order to start pushing and pulling messages.
My questions are:

What alternatives exist to SQS, I know of Redis, RabbittMQ, but both need local deployment, configuration and that might lead to unreliable functionality, if for example the box that is running it suddenly crashes and other boxes are not able to write messages to the queue.
If I choose something like Redis, to be deployed in my in my box, is it worth it over SQS, or I should just stay with SQS and look for another solution ?

Thanks
You may have solved this by now since the question is old; I had the same issues a while back and the costs ($$) of polling SQS in my application were sizable.  I migrated it to REDIS successfully without much effort.  I eventually migrated the REDIS host to ElasticCache's REDIS and have been very pleased with the solution.  I am able to snapshot it and scale it as needed. Hope that helps.
Alternative to Amazon SQS for Python