The number of bytes that can be written to the message buffer before the message buffer would be full. When a message is written to the message buffer an additional sizeof( size_t ) bytes are also written to store the message's length. sizeof( size_t ) is typically 4 bytes on a 32-bit architecture, so if xMessageBufferSpacesAvailable() returns 10, then the size of the largest message that can be written to the message buffer is 6 bytes.