MassTransit/RabbitMQ: one service or multiple services - rabbitmq

I have around 300 different consumers / 300 message types / 300 queues with the most wildest functionality behind it.
From the extreme side:
Is the best choice to make 1 windows service (easier to deploy) with 300 consumers listening.
Or 300 windows services (easier to split between devs) each independent 1 consumer but impossible to maintain by support
?
update: from 1 to 300 queues

RabbitMQ can support hundreds of queues simultaneously, and each queue should be responsible for one specific type of message e.g. a response status or an online order information or a stack trace information for further processing by some other unit of work, these three are not same and if you are keeping them all in one then please segregate them into different queues.
If you will keep all the data in one queue it will also effect your application performance as each queue works in a sequential order and since you have 300 consumers that wait for 300 types of messages, almost all of them could be in waiting state and it is also a reason for complex decision making algorithm, if you are using one to figure out the correct consumer.
What could also go wrong with a single queue is that it is now a bottleneck which could obstruct the functioning of the whole application, if that queue fails, because every consumer listens to it. By having different queues the rest of the system can still process if one particular queue faces an issue.
Instead of going for 1 consumer per service you can check if there's anything common and if the services can take up more consumers than one after increasing the number of queues from 1 to many.

Related

Working With Multiple Instances of a Consumer (HA Cluster)

I'm having problems finding any information on how to scale RabbitMQ consumers, specifically, how to work with multiple instances of the same component.
Say I have two components; A and B. I have three instances of each component set up as an HA cluster. Let's say A.1 sends a message with a key which matches B. I only want one instance of B to consume this message not all 3 of them.
Can you point me to some documentation which explains how this can be done? Ideally, some information about the load balancing approach adopted would be appreciated.
Should not be a problem as RabbitMQ uses variety of asynchronous architectural patterns to decouple applications and one of them is round robin
Round-Robin
By default RabbitMQ immediately dispatches (or pre-assigns) each message to the next consumer in sequence when it enters the queue. It dispatches messages evenly where where on average every consumer will get the same number of messages.
A shortcoming of this approach is when messages use uneven resources. In a situation with two workers, when all odd messages are heavy and even messages are light, one worker will be constantly busy and the other will do little work.
As shown in the example below , both the consumers will get the messages in a round robin manner , so in your case if the three instances bound to the same queue then one message will go to only one of the consumers , the KEY is that they should bind to a common queue.

Dequeuing in batches

When dequeuing from RabbitMQ it seems that the entire queue of messages is taken into memory and then processed, a minimal example can be the tutorial at https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/tutorial-two-dotnet.html.
Giving for example 1000 messages, they are taken all together in the event Received and the event handler manages 1000 messages: instead, I would to take 100 messages at time in order to divide the message consuming among 2 or more servers using a load balancer as HAProxy.
Is it possible or the only possibility is in the event handler make a manual round robin to other servers?
You have to use the prefecth to decide how many messages you want to download to the client.
instead, I would take 100 messages at a time in order to divide the message consuming among 2 or more servers.
it is what is explained here of "Fair dispatch" section, in your case you have to set the prefetch to 100 instead of 1 and attach more consumers to the same queue.

To be sure about concurrency, same group of works in multiple queues (FIFO)

I have a question about multi consumer concurrency.
I want to send works to rabbitmq that comes from web request to distributed queues.
I just want to be sure about order of works in multiple queues (FIFO).
Because this request comes from different users eech user requests/works must be ordered.
I have found this feature with different names on Azure ServiceBus and ActiveMQ message grouping.
Is there any way to do this in pretty RabbitMQ ?
I want to quaranty that customer's requests must be ordered each other.
Each customer may have multiple requests but those requests for that customer must be processed in order.
I desire to process quickly incoming requests with using multiple consumer on different nodes.
For example different customers 1 to 1000 send requests over 1 millions.
If I put this huge request in only one queue it takes a lot of time to consume. So I want to share this process load between n (5) node. For customer X 's requests must be in same sequence for processing
When working with event-based systems, and especially when using multiple producers and/or consumers, it is important to come to terms with the fact that there usually is no such thing as a guaranteed order of events. And to get a robust system, it is also wise to design the system so the message handlers are idempotent; they should tolerate to get the same message twice (or more).
There are way to many things that may (and actually should be allowed to) interfere with the order;
The producers may deliver the messages in a slightly different pace
One producer might miss an ack (due to a missed package) and will resend the message
One consumer may get and process a message, but the ack is lost on the way back, so the message is delivered twice (to another consumer).
Some other service that your handlers depend on might be down, so that you have to reject the message.
That being said, there is one pattern that servicebus-systems like NServicebus use to enforce the order messages are consumed. There are some requirements:
You will need a centralized storage (like a sql-server or document store) that allows for conditional updates; for instance you want to be able to store the sequence number of the last processed message (or how far you have come in the process), but only if the already stored sequence/progress is the right/expected one. Storing the user-id and the progress even for millions of customers should be a very easy operation for most databases.
You make sure the queue is configured with a dead-letter-queue/exchange for retries, and then set your original queue as a dead-letter-queue for that one again.
You set a TTL (for instance 30 seconds) on the retry/dead-letter-queue. This way the messages that appear on the dead-letter-queue will automatically be pushed back to your original queue after some timeout.
When processing your messages you check your storage/database if you are in the right state to handle the message (i.e. the needed previous steps are already done).
If you are ok to handle it you do and update the storage (conditionally!).
If not - you nack the message, so that it is thrown on the dead-letter queue. Basically you are saying "nah - I can't handle this message, there are probably some other message in the queue that should be handled first".
This way the happy-path is to process a great number of messages in the right order.
But if something happens and a you get a message out of band, you will throw it on the retry-queue (the dead-letter-queue) and Rabbit will make sure it will get back in the queue to be retried at a later stage. But only after a delay.
The beauty of this is that you are able to handle most of the situations that may interfere with processing the message (out of order messages, dependent services being down, your handler being shut down in the middle of handling the message) in exact the same way; by rejecting the message and letting your infrastructure (Rabbit) take care of it being retried after a while.
(Assuming the OP is asking about things like ActiveMQs "message grouping:)
This isn't currently built in to RabbitMQ AFAIK (it wasn't as of 2013 as per this answer) and I'm not aware of it now (though I haven't kept up lately).
However, RabbitMQ's model of exchanges and queues is very flexible - exchanges and queues can be easily created dynamically (this can be done in other messaging systems but, for example, if you read ActiveMQ documentation or Red Hat AMQ documentation you'll find all of the examples in the user guides are using pre-declared queues in configuration files loaded at system startup - except for RPC-like request/response communication).
Also it is very easy in RabbitMQ for a consumer (i.e., message consuming thread) to consume from multiple queues.
So you could build, on top of RabbitMQ, a system where you got your desired grouping semantics.
One way would be to create dynamic queues: The first time a customer order was seen or a new group of customer orders a queue would be created with a unique name for all messages for that group - that queue name would be communicated (via another queue) to a consumer who's sole purpose was to load-balance among other consumers that were responsible for handling customer order groups. I.e., the load-balancer would pull off of its queue a message saying "new group with queue name XYZ" and it would find in a pool of order group consumer a consumer which could take this load and pass it a message saying "start listening to XYZ".
Another way to do it is with pub/sub and topic routing - each customer order group would get a unique topic - and proceed as above.
RabbitMQ Consistent Hash Exchange Type
We are using RabbitMQ and we have found a plugin. It use Consistent Hashing algorithm to distribute messages in order to consistent keys.
For more information about Consistent Hashing ;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistent_hashing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viaNG1zyx1g
You can find this plugin from rabbitmq web page
plugin : rabbitmq_consistent_hash_exchange
https://www.rabbitmq.com/plugins.html

Max IEndpointInstances per process

Is there an upper limit to the number of unique IEndpointInstances that be hosted within in a single process?
I'm considering a design that will see up to a 100 unique IEndpointInstances, all listening on separate queues, be active simultaneously.
Will this cause a problem for NServiceBus? Could the process deadlock or spin up so many threads as to be unresponsive and useless?
The question NServiceBus - How to get separate queue for each message type receiver subscribes to? seems to suggest that you can not have multiple endpoints in a process, but this is an older post. I have built a small sample against NServiceBus 6--beta4 that does work.
There is a similar question NServiceBus Single Process, but Multiple Input queues that concluded, based on the OP's context using Satellite Features was the recommended approach. However, in my case, I have 100 (functionally different) sagas (1 per queue), where each saga could need to receive similar messages, but I need to make sure that only the correct saga receives the message. Therefor, I don't think implementing a custom feature will meet my requirements. Or will Satellite Features support Sagas?
One of the options is to use self multi hosting. Using this approach, you self the endpoints yourself in the same process. There are a few things to take into consideration, such as:
Assembly scanning (might require custom scanning logic per endpoint).
Throughput (for heavy throughput endpoints I'd recommend a separate hosting process).
To update/redeploy a single endpoint, you'll be taking all of the other 99 endpoints down as well.
While there's no hard limit on how many endpoints can be co-hosted, 100 sounds a bit a lot. Saying that, it also depends how heavy the load on those endpoints is. If you process 1 msg/sec or 1K msg/sec determine a lot if this is a viable option or not.
Have a look at the sample that does exactly that.

How to load balancing ActiveMQ with persistent message

I have a middleware based on Apache Camel which does a transaction like this:
from("amq:job-input")
to("inOut:businessInvoker-one") // Into business processor
to("inOut:businessInvoker-two")
to("amq:job-out");
Currently it works perfectly. But I can't scale it up, let say from 100 TPS to 500 TPS. I already
Raised the concurrent consumers settings and used empty businessProcessor
Configured JAVA_XMX and PERMGEN
to speed up the transaction.
According to Active MQ web Console, there are so many messages waiting for being processed on scenario 500TPS. I guess, one of the solution is scale the ActiveMQ up. So I want to use multiple brokers in cluster.
According to http://fuse.fusesource.org/mq/docs/mq-fabric.html (Section "Topologies"), configuring ActiveMQ in clustering mode is suitable for non-persistent message. IMHO, it is true that it's not suitable, because all running brokers use the same store file. But, what about separating the store file? Now it's possible right?
Could anybody explain this? If it's not possible, what is the best way to load balance persistent message?
Thanks
You can share the load of persistent messages by creating 2 master/slave pairs. The master and slave share their state either though a database or a shared filesystem so you need to duplicate that setup.
Create 2 master slave pairs, and configure so called "network connectors" between the 2 pairs. This will double your performance without risk of loosing messages.
See http://activemq.apache.org/networks-of-brokers.html
This answer relates to an version of the question before the Camel details were added.
It is not immediately clear what exactly it is that you want to load balance and why. Messages across consumers? Producers across brokers? What sort of concern are you trying to address?
In general you should avoid using networks of brokers unless you are trying to address some sort of geographical use case, have too many connections for a signle broker to handle, or if a single broker (which could be a pair of brokers configured in HA) is not giving you the throughput that you require (in 90% of cases it will).
In a broker network, each node has its own store and passes messages around by way of a mechanism called store-and-forward. Have a read of Understanding broker networks for an explanation of how this works.
ActiveMQ already works as a kind of load balancer by distributing messages evenly in a round-robin fashion among the subscribers on a queue. So if you have 2 subscribers on a queue, and send it a stream of messages A,B,C,D; one subcriber will receive A & C, while the other receives B & D.
If you want to take this a step further and group related messages on a queue so that they are processed consistently by only one subscriber, you should consider Message Groups.
Adding consumers might help to a point (depends on the number of cores/cpus your server has). Adding threads beyond the point your "Camel server" is utilizing all available CPU for the business processing makes no sense and can be conter productive.
Adding more ActiveMQ machines is probably needed. You can use an ActiveMQ "network" to communicate between instances that has separated persistence files. It should be straight forward to add more brokers and put them into a network.
Make sure you performance test along the road to make sure what kind of load the broker can handle and what load the camel processor can handle (if at different machines).
When you do persistent messaging - you likely also want transactions. Make sure you are using them.
If all running brokers use the same store file or tx-supported database for persistence, then only the first broker to start will be active, while others are in standby mode until the first one loses its lock.
If you want to loadbalance your persistence, there were two way that we could try to do:
configure several brokers in network-bridge mode, then send messages
to any one and consumer messages from more than one of them. it can
loadbalance the brokers and loadbalance the persistences.
override the persistenceAdapter and use the database-sharding middleware
(such as tddl:https://github.com/alibaba/tb_tddl) to store the
messages by partitions.
Your first step is to increase the number of workers that are processing from ActiveMQ. The way to do this is to add the ?concurrentConsumers=10 attribute to the starting URI. The default behaviour is that only one thread consumes from that endpoint, leading to a pile up of messages in ActiveMQ. Adding more brokers won't help.
Secondly what you appear to be doing could benefit from a Staged Event-Driven Architecture (SEDA). In a SEDA, processing is broken down into a number of stages which can have different numbers of consumer on them to even out throughput. Your threads consuming from ActiveMQ only do one step of the process, hand off the Exchange to the next phase and go back to pulling messages from the input queue.
You route can therefore be rewritten as 2 smaller routes:
from("activemq:input?concurrentConsumers=10").id("FirstPhase")
.process(businessInvokerOne)
.to("seda:invokeSecondProcess");
from("seda:invokeSecondProcess?concurentConsumers=20").id("SecondPhase")
.process(businessInvokerTwo)
.to("activemq:output");
The two stages can have different numbers of concurrent consumers so that the rate of message consumption from the input queue matches the rate of output. This is useful if one of the invokers is much slower than another.
The seda: endpoint can be replaced with another intermediate activemq: endpoint if you want message persistence.
Finally to increase throughput, you can focus on making the processing itself faster, by profiling the invokers themselves and optimising that code.