How to configure RabbitMQ bidirectional shovel and avoid infinite loop? - rabbitmq

I have 2 RabbitMQ clusters in separate datacenters. At the moment we are shovelling one of the exchanges from an one rabbit to the other but now we need to shovel in the other direction too. How can we achieve this without causing an infinite loop?
A colleague thought we could tick the "Add Forwarding Headers" options and then filter using a Header exchange. However, the headers that get added appear to be nested and I've not found a way to match against the headers?

Seems based on the additional description you provided that:
You are using shovel between exchanges
Guessing that the exchange type is fanout
I can see two approaches to handle what you're trying to do:
Use federation, and configure it in both directions between the exchanges in each cluster
Still use shovel, but define a new queue on each exchange and configure a queue to queue shovel
For the shovel option:
You have exchange A on cluster 1, exchange A on cluster 2,
your main_queue on each cluster
Create a secondary_queue on each cluster, bound to exchange A.
Create a shovel from secondary queue on cluster 1 to main_queue on cluster 2
Create a shovel from secondary queue on cluster 2 to main_queue on cluster 1
Benefit of Federation: simpler, even when you have complex routing configured
Benefit of shovel: better if you have risk of major connection disruption (more than a minute I'd say). In such cases you won't lose messages while it might happen in the Federation case that some messages don't get replicated on both clusters.

Related

Does NServiceBus 4.x with RabbitMQ support round robing consumers or the competing consumer model?

I'm using NServiceBus 4.x with RabbitMQ 3.2.x as my transport.
I made the assumption that by using RabbitMQ as my transport I would be given the competing consumer model as an option. I understand that NServiceBus employs the "Fannout" exchange type for all exchanges and does not support round robin at this time. However is there a way to configure NServiceBus to take advantage of the levels of indirection via Exchanges and channels that RabbitMQ offers.
I have several consumers I would like to compete for messages from a given queue. What I am observing is subscribers' blocking access to further message retrieval from the queue until the message is consumed. So having more then one consumer at this point does me no good other then redundancy.
After reading some documentation on RabbitMQ I'm assuming that it's normal to block until the Ack receipt is sent from the subscriber. But I had assumed that subscriber #2 would have free access to the queue to fetch another message.
There is mention of increasing the prefetch count on RabbitMQ channel.
Example:
channel.BasicQos(0,prefetchcount,false)
I don't see anywhere that I can change this setting via configuration in NServiceBus. Furthermore as I read what prefetch does I'm really not sure this what i'm looking for.
Is it possible to use RabbitMQ with out a distirbutor type pattern used with MSMQ? Or should I move to MassTransit or Rebus?
Put prefetchcount=2 in your connection string. Any value above 1 will tell the broker to allow more than X unacked message to go out. You need to fiddle with this setting to find the optimum for your scenario.

RabbitMQ and round robin topic exchanges

I'm seeking some advise as to how best configure my rabbitMQ exchanges.
I'm trying to use a topic exchange in a round robin methodology. Each consumer has its own (uniquely) named queue attached to a topic exchange. I would like the exchange to round robin messages to each consumer queue for the "same" topic - lets say *.log for example.
I have tried multiple combinations and only seem to be able to simultaneously deliver messages to the consumer queues which effectively means I'm processing the message twice, once in each consumer.
For clarity I also have a fanout exchange, which I use to "control" the consumers (start, stop etc).this should remain in place in any outcome.
Any guidance on how best to achieve the stated outcome would be great.
Each consumer has its own (uniquely) named queue attached to a topic exchange
The trick is to have every worker/consumer that you want to round-robin between to setup a named queue and all use the same queue instead creating their own.
So you could create a named queue called "log" for all of the "log" workers. You would create a different named queue for say "foo" for all of the "foo" workers. Requests will be delivered round-robin to all consumers looking at the same queue.
To use RabbitMQ in round robin fashion, better to use direct exchange instead of topic exchange.
A direct exchange is ideal for the unicast routing of messages (although they can be used for multicast routing as well).
A queue binds to the exchange with a routing key K.
When a new message with routing key R arrives at the direct exchange, the exchange routes it to the queue if K = R.
Direct exchanges are often used to distribute tasks between multiple workers in a round robin manner. When doing so, it is important to understand that, messages are load balanced between consumers and not between queues.

Rabbitmq queue sharding

I have to implement this scenario:
An external application publish message to rabbitmq.
This message has a client_id property. We can place this id to routing key or message header or some other property.
I have to implement sharding in a exchange routng logic - the message should be delivered to specific queue based on the client_id range.
Is it possible to implement in a standard exchanges?
If not what exchange should I take as the base?
How to dynamicly change client_id ranges?
Take a look at the rabbitmq plugin. It's included in the RabbitMQ distribution from v3.6.0 onwards.
Just have your producer put enough info into the routing key that causes the message to go into the right queue on the other side of the Exchange.
So for example, create two queues called 1 and 2 and bind them with routing keys matching the names. Then have your producer decide which routing key to use when producing the event message. Customers with names starting with letters a-m go to 1, n-z go to 2, you get the idea. It pushes the sharding to the producer but that might be OK for your application.
AMQP doesn't have any explicit implementation of sharding, but its architecture should help you to do that.
Spreading messages to several queues is just a rabbitmq challenge (and part of amqp specification), and with routing, way you can attach hetereogeneous consumers to handle specific messages routed via the same exchange. Therefore, producer should push a specific key to be consumed by specific queue/consumer...
You can decide to make a static sharding, perhaps you have 10 queues with one consumer per queue. You could implement a consistent hashing function such that key is CLIENT_ID % 10.
Another ways and none static solutions could be propoused, and you can try to over this architecture.

Routing messages to one and only one queue

I have a Topic exchange from which I'd like to distribute messages to two queues on two servers part of a cluster, in order to reduce memory pressure on any particular server. My consumers are periodically slow, and I sometimes run into the high memory watermark.
The way I tried to resolve this is by routing messages using an intermediate direct exchange, with two queues bound to the exchange:
a (topic) -> a1 (direct) -> q1/q2 (bound to routing key "a")
But the messages were routed to both queues, as AMQP intends. Anyone has ideas? What I need is an exchange that routes to one and only one queue, even if the routing key matches many queues. I'd prefer not to change my routing keys, but that could be arranged.
I found Selective routing with RabbitMQ, which may mean I'll need to implement my own routing logic. Hopefully, this already exists somewhere else.
You could perhaps use the Shovel plugin - http://www.rabbitmq.com/shovel.html - to move messages from your intermediate exchange to the two queues.
If you set up two shovels, both consuming from a single queue on the direct intermediate exchange, they should be able to fight over the messages coming in (I'm assuming that you don't care too much if the two recipient queues don't get the incoming messages in a strict round robin fashion). The shovels then each publish to one of the two end queues, and can send through the ACKs from the end consumer.

RabbitMQ fan out on a topic exchange

Pretty new to RabbitMQ and we're still in the investigation stage to see if it's a good fit for our use cases--
We've readily come to the conclusion that our desired topology would have us deploying a few topic based exchanges, and then filtering from there to specific queues. For example, let's say we have a user and an upload exchange, where the user queue might receive messages where the topic is "new-registration" or "friend-request" and the upload exchange might receive messages like "video-upload" or "picture-upload".
Creating the queues, getting them routed to the appropriate queue, and then building listeners to handle the messages for the various queues has been quite straight forward.
What's unclear to me however is if it's possible to do a fanout on a topic exchange?
I.e. I have named queues that are bound to my topic exchange, but I'd like to be able to just throw tons of instances of my listeners at those queues to prevent single points of failure. But to the best of my knowledge, RabbitMQ treats these listeners in a straight forward round robin fashion--e.g. every Nth message always go to the same Nth listener rather than dispatching messages to the first available consumer. This is generally acceptable to us but given the load we anticipate, we'd like to avoid the possibility of hot spots developing amongst our consumer farm.
So, is there some way, either in the queue or exchange configuration or in the consumer code, where we can point our listeners to a topic queue but have the listeners treated in a fanout fashion?
Yes, by having the listeners bind using different queue names, they will be treated in a fanout fashion.
Fanout is 1:N though, i.e. each task can be delivered to multiple listeners like pub-sub. Note that this isn't restricted to a fanout exchange, but also applies if you bind multiple queues to a direct or topic exchange with the same binding key. (Installing the management plugin and looking at the exchanges there may be useful to visualize the bindings in effect.)
Your current setup is a task queue. Each task/message is delivered to exactly one worker/listener. Throw more listeners at the same queue name, and they will process the tasks round-robin as you say. With "fanout" (separate queues for a topic) you will process a task multiple times.
Depending on your platform there may be existing work queue solutions that meet your requirements, such as Resque or DelayedJob for Ruby, Celery for Python or perhaps Octobot or Akka for the JVM.
I don't know for a fact, but I strongly suspect that RabbitMQ will skip consumers with unacknowledged messages, so it should never bottleneck on a single stuck consumer. The comments on their FAQ seem to suggest that RabbitMQ will make an effort to keep things chugging along even in the presence of troublesome consumers.
This is a late answer, but in case others come across this question...
It sounds like what you want is fair dispatch rather than a fan out model (which would publish a given message to every queue).
Fair dispatch will give a message to the next available worker rather than using a simple round-robin approach. This should avoid the "hotspots" you are concerned about, without delivering the same message to multiple consumers.
If this is what you are looking for, then see the "Fair Dispatch" section on this page in the Rabbit docs. A prefetch count of 1 is the key here.