RabbitMQ, RPC, and Correlation ID Matching - rabbitmq

I'm following one of the RabbitMQ RPC tutorials (https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/tutorial-six-dotnet.html) and got a little confused around Correlation ID matching.
The tutorial states:
That's when the CorrelationId property is used. We're going to set it to a unique value for every request. Later, when we receive a message in the callback queue we'll look at this property, and based on that we'll be able to match a response with a request. If we see an unknown CorrelationId value, we may safely discard the message - it doesn't belong to our requests.
But why is it "safe" to discard the message after we've already consumed it from the queue? What about the client that is expecting that message? Shouldn't the message be re-queued to prevent loss?

Sounds resonable. But after a requeue it will not be quaranteed that the sender of the original message will receive it. Without more knowledge about the setup of exchanges, bindings and queues it is hard to tell if requeuing makes sense or not.
The above linked tutorial intentionally seems not to cover this complex problem. I think it would be out of scope for a tutorial that tells the reader how to technically use the RPC feature of RabbitMQ.

Related

Immediate flag in RabbitMQ

I have a clients that uses API. The API sends messeges to rabbitmq. Rabbitmq to workers.
I ought to reply to clients if somethings went wrong - message wasn't routed to a certain queue and wasn't obtained for performing at this time ( full confirmation )
A task who is started after 5-10 seconds does not make sense.
Appropriately, I must use mandatory and immediate flags.
I can't increase counts of workers, I can't run workers on another servers. It's a demand.
So, as I could find the immediate flag hadn't been supporting since rabbitmq v.3.0x
The developers of rabbitmq suggests to use TTL=0 for a queue instead but then I will not be able to check status of message.
Whether any opportunity to change that behavior? Please, share your experience how you solved problems like this.
Thank you.
I'm not sure, but after reading your original question in Russian, it might be that using both publisher and consumer confirms may be what you want. See last three paragraphs in this answer.
As you want to get message result for published message from your worker, it looks like RPC pattern is what you want. See RabbitMQ RPC tuttorial. Pick a programming language section there you most comfortable with, overall concept is the same. You may also find Direct reply-to useful.
It's not the same as immediate flag functionality, but in case all your publishers operate with immediate scenario, it might be that AMQP protocol is not the best choice for such kind of task. Immediate mean "deliver this message right now or burn in hell" and it might be a situation when you publish more than you can process. In such cases RPC + response timeout may be a good choice on application side (e.g. socket timeout). But it doesn't work well for non-idempotent RPC calls while message still be processed, so you may want to use per-queue or per-message TTL (or set queue length limit). In case message will be dead-lettered, you may get it there (in case you need that for some reason).
TL;DR
As to "something" can go wrong, it can go so on different levels which we for simplicity define as:
before RabbitMQ, like sending application failure and network problems;
inside RabbitMQ, say, missed destination queue, message timeout, queue length limit, some hard and unexpected internal error;
after RabbitMQ, in most cases - messages processing application error or some third-party services like data persistence or caching layer outage.
Some errors like network outage or hardware error are a bit epic and are not a subject of this q/a.
Typical scenario for guaranteed message delivery is to use publisher confirms or transactions (which are slower). After you got a confirm it mean that RabbitMQ got your message and if it has route - placed in a queue. If not it is dropped OR if mandatory flag set returned with basic.return method.
For consumers it's similar - after basic.consumer/basic.get, client ack'ed message it considered received and removed from queue.
So when you use confirms on both ends, you are protected from message loss (we'll not run into a situation that there might be some bug in RabbitMQ itself).
Bogdan, thank you for your reply.
Seems, I expressed my thought enough clearly.
Scheme may looks like this. Each component of system must do what it must do :)
The an idea is make every component more simple.
How to task is performed.
Clients goes to HTTP-API with requests and must obtain a respones like this:
Positive - it have put to queue
Negative - response with error and a reason
When I was talking about confirmation I meant that I must to know that a message is delivered ( there are no free workers - rabbitmq can remove a message ), a client must be notified.
A sent message couldn't be delivered to certain queue, a client must be notified.
How to a message is handled.
Messages is sent for performing.
Status of perfoming is written into HeartBeat
Status.
Clients obtain status from HeartBeat by itself and then decide that
it's have to do.
I'm not sure, that RPC may be useful for us i.e. RPC means that clients must to wait response from server. Tasks may works a long time. Excess bound between clients and servers, additional logic on client-side.
Limited size of queue maybe not useful too.
Possible situation when a size of queue maybe greater than counts of workers. ( problem in configuration or defined settings ).
Then an idea with 5-10 seconds doesn't make sense.
TTL doesn't usefull because of:
Setting the TTL to 0 causes messages to be expired upon reaching a
queue unless they can be delivered to a consumer immediately. Thus
this provides an alternative to basic.publish's immediate flag, which
the RabbitMQ server does not support. Unlike that flag, no
basic.returns are issued, and if a dead letter exchange is set then
messages will be dead-lettered.
direct reply-to :
The RPC server will then see a reply-to property with a generated
name. It should publish to the default exchange ("") with the routing
key set to this value (i.e. just as if it were sending to a reply
queue as usual). The message will then be sent straight to the client
consumer.
Then I will not be able to route messages.
So, I'm sorry. I may flounder in terms i.e. I'm new in AMQP and rabbitmq.

What is a proper way to acknowledge an MQ message from a chain of actors?

We want to use Akka to implement a scenario when messages are fetched from a message queue (RabbitMQ) and then processed by a chain of actors. The queue is durable and messages must not be lost. So we need to send an acknowledgement (BasicAck in RabbitMQ) back to the queue in order to finalize the dequeued message. Because of that the very last actor in the processing chain needs to do the acknowledgement. This seems to be rather common need, and I wonder if there is a known pattern for this. Vaughn Vernon in his book writes about using Return Address, so all messages sent along the chain will have the return address (of the MQ channel actor) and the correlation identifier that specifies the queue message tag. Is this the proper way to do it?
An alternative is to ack the message right after the receival and then use persistent actors to provide its guaranteed delivery, but I was adviced against such approach because use of AMPQ eliminates the need for actor persistance for this particular scenario.
I'm not really familiar with Akka, but I think I get the gist of what it does (very similar to "process" in Erlang - i think - which is what RMQ is built on).
In general, your first suggestion from Vaughn Vernon's book is the way to go.
In my specific scenarios, I have taken a "middleware" approach to what you are suggesting. My specific middleware implementation forwards the message itself through a chain of commands that process the message. Each command calls an action.next() method to continue forwarding to the next command.
Prior to sending the message through the middleware, I create a default last-command-in-the-chain. This default command simply calls actions.ack() - which, behind the scenes, acknowledged the message.
I do things this way so that the commands never have to know anything about how to actually implement the mechanics of completing and moving on to the next thing. They have an API specific to themselves, being commands in a chain.
This allows me to change the implementation of acknowledging the message, or how i handle messages from RMQ, etc, without changing the commands directly.
Ack'ing the message immediately introduces danger, as your actor could crash, Akka itself could crash, and a host of other problems can (and will) occur, and you'll be more likely to lose the message.
Remember, though - there is not 100% perfect setup. You will, at some point, lose a message or process the same message twice. Your system needs to handle these scenarios in some way, at some point. Everything your doing is heading down the right path to make this less likely, but nothing will ever prevent crashes and message loss 100% of the time.

Multiple acknowledge for the same delivery tag

In my project I saw that there is a chance of acknowledging the same delivery tag twice. When this happens, the consumer gets unbound from the queue and no further messages come to the consumer (Observed using the RabbitMQ management dashboard).
How can I check that a given delivery tag has already been acknowledged? Is there a recommended way to handle such scenario using the RabbitMQ API?
I tried to avoid acknowledging twice in my code but unfortunately it is not possible due to some design issues.
As the AMQP protocol reference is pretty clear about this:
A message MUST not be acknowledged more than once. The receiving peer MUST validate that a non-zero delivery-tag refers to a delivered message, and raise a channel exception if this is not the case. ...
A quick test reveals that, at least in current versions, this does not cause a consumer to stop working, but that behavior might be implementation-dependent.
In short, you would have to review your design to avoid this situation.

RabbitMQ - basic reject with metadata

I've got a consumer that rejects messages and knows exactly why those messages were rejected. She'd like to provide the "why" as well as the "what" to the producer when rejecting a message.
What's a good queue architecture for nack'ing messages but also sending back metadata describing why the message failed?
(At a higher level, if the producer isn't doing anything with the 'nacked reason codes, I'm thinking logging the reason codes from the consumer would suffice for visibility, so the question becomes moot. Still, seems like an interesting question assuming otherwise.)
You can use the RPC model as described here:
https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/tutorial-six-java.html
In this way you can send-back to the publisher a message with the reason.
You can also considerer Dead Letter Exchanges extension, but you can't change the message, so you are just informed that your message has been rejected.
With a little work, you can create an exchange where you redirect the nack messages, and using the header property message to write the reason, like that:
Map<String, Object> myHeader = new HashMap<String, Object>();
myHeader("reason", "can't access to database");//<-- just an example
AMQP.BasicProperties.Builder bob = new AMQP.BasicProperties.Builder();
bob.headers(myHeader);
In this way you can maintain the original message and modify only the header. (similar to Dead Letter Message)
hope it helps
I fall into similar issue. My solution was to assign unique ID to each message on sending (using properties) and then on rejection save error (associating it with assigned ID) into redis / memcached (I also used time expiration in redis to not overload storage). It is possible in my case, because I quickly handle all these dead messages so errors should not be keeped for a long time.
Probably not so elegant, but I didn't want publish anything manually and preferred rely on native rabbit functionality and I didn't nee many changes to the code.

Publish and subscribe from same Queue in Rabbitmq

I am trying to set up broadcast messaging to all nodes in the system. When a new node joins the system, it publishes a message to everyone else to announce its entry. The way I have designed is that, a exchange exists to which all nodes will bind its own queue. Whenever a new node joins the system, it will bind its queue as well to the exchange and publish a message to the exchange. All nodes will receive this msg(including itself) and all other nodes(except this message) will send a "ack" message so that the new node will get to know the available nodes in the system. But somehow I couldn't able to get this working. My broadcast messages doesn't propagate to every node in the system. A simple one node publishing and rest consuming is working. But same node publishing and consuming is somehow screwed up somewhere.
Is there any other efficient way of doing this apart from the logic mentioned above? Or is there any restriction from rabbitmq perspective to achieve the above or is my code buggy and do I have to take a closer look at it.
The way you described it, your solution should work. However, without more detailed code examples (of the consume/publish logic in the "announcer" and the consume/acknowledge-publish logic in the other peers) it's difficult to debug.
A couple common problems could be tripping you up, though:
If you're considering "did I get responses back from all the other nodes" as the authority for "did the other nodes get my announce message?", you might need to acknowledge (basic.ack in AMQP) the messages your announcer is receiving as it gets them. Otherwise, it's possible you're not seeing subsequent messages due to consumer prefetch, though in most client libraries you'd have to be explicitly turning that on somewhere first.
Make sure your other peers (the ones receiving the "announce" and sending a message back) are acknowledging the message as well, or are consuming in "no-ack" mode. Otherwise, if they get blocked (via flow, rate-limiting, or prefetch), they will probably receive announces for awhile and then stop.
Make sure you're using a "fanout" type exchange. It sounds like you want unconditional-fanout behavior, so you don't need to muck about with topic routing. If you're using a topic or direct exchange, you may have a bug in your routing logic, in which case switching to fanout will work. I suspect you're already doing this though.
This is likely not the issue, but: you mention that your peers (not the announcer) are "acknowledging" the announce. Make sure that they acknowledge the announce by publishing a new message back to the announcer's queue directly (with no exchange, just a routing key), not by sending a basic.ack to RabbitMQ (that doesn't notify the sender of anything), and not by publishing an announce-received to the fanout exchange.
As an aside, I don't know why you're doing declare-queue/bind/publish as opposed to publish/declare-queue/bind; is there a good reason you need an announcing node to receive its own announce message? If you're after a "self-test" behavior, I think it's probably better to just implement a periodic "can things announce successfully?" health-check somewhere instead, though that's entirely subjective.
Have you tried the RPC style message, with a callback queue that you identify in the broadcast message's propeties? Like at the rabbitmq tutorial.