On our RabbitMQ installed in production, we have a performance issue.
To explain the context, we have an initialization batch that creates around ~60k messages. For business reasons, those messages must be treated in strict order and we can't lose any. As such, we have only one queue which is durable and lazy and one consumer (SpringBoot AMQP) with a prefetch of 10. Both are on the same virtual machine.
At first, the processing is fast enough, around 5 to 10 messages per second. But it progressively slows down until it reaches a cap of fewer than 20 messages per hour. It takes approximately 1 hour to reach this point.
After some investigations, we found out that the problem comes from RabbitMQ. When we simply stop and restart it, the performance goes back to normal and then drops slowly again. Doing the same on just the consumer doesn't change anything.
I'm thinking about some resources bottleneck but I can't manage to find which one as RAM, CPU, and disk looks fine. I am not really familiar with ERL virtual machine and managing RabbitMQ itself so I may have missed something.
Does someone as an idea of the source of the problem or where I could look for more information on what is happening?
RabbitMQ characteristics :
ERL 23.3.2
RabbitMQ 3.8.14
Related
Background
I am experiencing some abnormal behavior in the RabbitMQ cluster in which the cluster seems to stop responding in a timely and performant fashion. Producers enter FlowControl, and consumers do not get messages.
The server has:
Spare CPU capacity (topping out at around 50%)
Lots of free memory
IOPS blow provisioned IOPS rates
Yet, under high load I see connections going into FlowControl, latency increasing across the board and consumers timing out on acks :(
Problem I am trying to solve
The current metrics I am looking at, do not indicate something is going wrong.
Which metrics, logs and events should I look at to understand that the system is going towards max capacity? Is it possible to understand which type of FlowControl is Rabbit going through?
Versions used
rabbitmq_erlang_version: 1:25.1.2-1
rabbitmq_server_version: 3.10.10-1
Happy to provide any further information needed : )
We've recently come across a problem when using RabbitMQ: when the hard drive of our server is full, RabbitMQ's vhost are getting corrupted, and unusable.
The only to make RabbitMQ functional again is to delete, and recreate the corrupted hosts.
Doing so, all of our queues, and exchanges, along with the data in it, is then gone.
While this situation should not happen in prod, we're searching for a way to prevent data loss, if such an event does occur.
We've been looking at the official rabbitMQ documentation, as well as on stack exchange, but haven't found any solution to prevent data loss when a host is corrupted.
We plan on setting up a cluster at a later stage of development, which should at least help in reducing the loss of data when a vhost is corrupted, but it's not possible for now.
Is there any reliable way to either prevent vhost corruption, or to fix the vhost without losing data?
Some thoughts on this (in no particular order):
RabbitMQ has multiple high-availability configurations - relying upon a single node provides no protection against data loss.
In general, you can have one of two possible guarantees with a message, but never both:
At least once delivery - a message will be delivered at least one time, and possibly more.
At most once delivery - a message may or may not be delivered, but if it is delivered, it will never be delivered a second time
Monitoring the overall health of your nodes (i.e. disk space, processor use, memory, etc.) should be done proactively by a tool specific to that purpose. You should never be surprised by running out of a critical system resource.
If you are running one node, and that node is out of disk space, and you have a bunch of messages on it, and you're worried about data loss, wondering how RabbitMQ can help you, I would say you have your priorities mixed up.
RabbitMQ is not a database. It is not designed to reliably store messages for an indefinite time period. Please don't count on it as such.
We are using rabbitmq (3.6.6) to send analysis (millions) to different analyzers. These are very quick and we were planning on use the rabbit-message-plugin to schedule monitorizations over the analyzed elements.
We were thinking about rabbitmq-delayed-exchange-plugin, already made some tests and we need some clarification.
Currently:
We are scheduling millions of messages
Delays range from a few minutes to 24 hours
As previously said, these are tests, so we are using a machine with one core and 4G of RAM which has also other apps running on it.
What happened with a high memory watermark set up at 2.0G:
RabbitMQ eventually (a day or so) starts consuming 100% (only one core) and does not respond to the management interface nor rabbitmqctl. This goes on for at least 18 hours (always end up killing, deleting mnesia delayed file on disk - about 100 / 200 MB - and restarting).
What happened with a high memory watermark set up at 3.6G:
RabbitMQ was killed by kernel, because of high memory usage (4 GB hardware) about a week after working like this.
Mnesia file for delayed exchange is about 1.5G
RabbitMQ cannot start anymore giving to the below trace (we are assuming that because of being terminated by a KILL messages in the delay somehow ended up corrupted or something
{could_not_start,rabbit,
rabbitmq-server[12889]: {{case_clause,{timeout,['rabbit_delayed_messagerabbit#rabbitNode']}},
rabbitmq-server[12889]: [{rabbit_boot_steps,'-run_step/2-lc$^1/1-1-',1,
And right now we are asking ourselves: Are we a little over our heads using rabbit delayed exchange plugin for this volumes of information? If we are, then end of the problem, rethink and restart, but if not, what could be an appropiate hardware and/or configuration setup?
RabbitMQ delayed exchange plugin is not properly designed to store millions of messages.
It is also documented to the plugin page
Current design of this plugin doesn't really fit scenarios with a high
number of delayed messages (e.g. 100s of thousands or millions). See
72 for details.
Read also here: https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-delayed-message-exchange/issues/72
This plugin is often used as if RabbitMQ was a database. It is not.
I have a publisher pushing to a queue at a slightly larger rate than the consumers can consume. For small numbers, it is okay, but for a very large number of messages, RabbitMQ starts writing it to the disk. At a certain point of time, the disk becomes full, and flow control is triggered. From then on, the rates are really slow. Is there any way to decrease or share this load between cluster nodes? How should I design my application so that flow control is never triggered?
I am using RabbitMQ 3.2.3 on three nodes with 13G RAM, and 10G of system disk space - connected to each other through the cluster. Two of these are RAM nodes, and the remaining one is a disk node, also used for RabbitMQ management plugin.
You can tweak the configuration, upgrade hardware etc and in the end you'd probably want to put a load balancer in front of your RabbitMQ servers to balance the load between multiple RabbitMQ nodes. The problem here is that if you are publishing at a higher rate than you are consuming, eventually you will run into this problem again, and again.
I think the best way to prevent this from happening is to implement logic on the publisher side that keeps track of the number of requests waiting to be processed in the queue. If the number of requests exceeds X the publisher should either wait until the number of messages has gone down, or publish new messages at a slower rate. This type of solution of course depends on where the messages published are coming from, if they are user submitted (e.g. through a browser or client) you could show a loading-bar when the queue builds-up.
Ideally though you should focus on making the processing on the consumer side faster, and maybe scale that part up, but having something to throttle the publisher when it gets busy should help prevent buildups.
I am working on a proof of concept implementation of NServiceBus v4.x for work.
Right now I have two subscribers and a single publisher.
The publisher can publish over 500 message per second. It runs great.
Subscriber A runs without distributors/workers. It is a single process.
Subscriber B runs with a single distributor powering N number of workers.
In my test I hit an endpoint that creates and publishes 100,000 messages. I do this publish with the subscribers off line.
Subscriber A processes a steady 100 messages per second.
Subscriber B with 2+ workers (same result with 2, 3, or 4) struggles to top 50 messages per second gross across all workers.
It seems in my scenario that the workers (which I ramped up to 40 threads per worker) are waiting around for the distributor to give them work.
Am I missing something possibly that is causing the distributor to be throttled? All Buses are running an unlimited Dev license.
System Information:
Intel Core i5 M520 # 2.40 GHz
8 GBs of RAM
SSD Hard Drive
UPDATE 08/06/2013: I finished deploying the system to a set of servers. I am experiencing the same results. Every server with a worker that I add decreases the performance of the subscriber.
Subscriber B has a distributor on one server and two additional servers for workers. With Subscriber B and one server with an active worker I am experiencing ~80 messages/events per second. Adding in another worker on an additional physical machine decreases that to ~50 messages per second. Also, these are "dummy messages". No logic actually happens in the handlers other than a log of the message through log4net. Turning off the logging doesn't increase performance.
Suggestions?
If you're scaling out with NServiceBus master/worker nodes on one server, then trying to measure performance is meaningless. One process with multiple threads will always do better than a distributor and multiple worker nodes on the same machine because the distributor will become a bottleneck while everything is competing for the same compute resources.
If the workers are moved to separate servers, it becomes a completely different story. The distributor is very efficient at doling out messages if that's the only thing happening on the server.
Give it a try with multiple servers and see what happens.
Rather than have a dummy handler that does nothing, can you simulate actual processing by adding in some sleep time, say 5 seconds. And then compare the results of having a subscriber and through the distributor?
Scaling out (with or without a distributor) is only useful for where the work being done by a single machine takes time and therefore more computing resources helps.
To help with this, monitor the CriticalTime performance counter on the endpoint and when you have the need, add in the distributor.
Scaling out using the distributor when needed is made easy by not having to change code, just starting the same endpoint in distributor and worker profiles.
The whole chain is transactional. You are paying heavy for this. Increasing the workload across machines will really not increase performance when you do not have very fast disk storage with write through caching to speed up transactional writes.
When you have your poc scaled out to several servers just try to mark a messages as 'Express' which does not do transactional writes in the queue and disable MSDTC on the bus instance to see what kind of performance is possible without transactions. This is not really usable for production unless you know where this is not mandatory or what is capable when you have a architecture which does not require DTC.