I have a Message Queue which loses its Consumers from time to time.
What could be the possible reasons for this? And how can I prevent this from happening?
What could be the possible reasons for this?
The most obvious reason is your client application stopping or crashing. Without more information, it is impossible to answer this question.
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In my app(multiple instances), we occasionally see the case where connection is lost between my app and rabbitmq due to network issues(my app and rabbitmq are both alive), then after connection is recovered(re-established) we will receive messages that are unacked.
This creates an issue for us, because my app wasn't dead, and it is still processing the same message it received before, but now the message is redeivered, and it causes the app to process the message again (which can be fatal to us).
Since the app has multiple instances, it is not easy for an instance to check if another instance is processing the same message at the same time. We can't simply filter out redelivered message, because we need this feature to handle instance/app crashes/re-deployments.
It doesn't seem that there is an api to tell rabbitmq when to not redeliver unacked messages.
So what is the recommended practice to handle this situation ?
Thanks,
The general solution for such scenario is to make the consumers handle the messages in an idempotent manner . Generally what I do is from the producer side ( in case there is no unique identifier in the message body ) I add an attribute idempotencyId to the message body which is a guid and on the consumer side for each message this id is validated against the stored value in database , any duplicates are rejected.
This approach also works for messages which might be shoveled from another cluster or if in a same cluster multiple instances of consumers are listening then too this approach guarantee one time processing.
Would suggest to go over the RabbitMQ Reliability Guide here
Yeah, exactly-once delivery is not something RabbitMQ is good at. In fact, I'd say you should probably not be using it for these kinds of problems. Honestly, the only way to truly fix this is to use distributed transactions or locking.
Anyway, you could turn the problem on its head by ack'ing the message as soon as the consumer gets it, before it starts working on it. That would avoid the RabbitMQ-related duplication issue at least. This is at-most-once delivery.
Of course, it means that if the consumer crashes, the message is lost forever. So you need to persist the message right before you ack it so you can recover it later and also the consumer should remove it once it's complete.
Considering that crashes are rare, you can then have a single dedicated process that just works on those persisted messages. Or for that matter, handle them manually.
Just be aware that you are pushing the duplication problem in front of you, because the consumer might fail to remove the persisted message after it's done working with it anyway, but at least you have the option to implement it however you want.
Storage in this case could be anything from files, a RDBMS or something like ZooKeeper or Redis to lock/unlock in-flight messages.
Recently, I have encounted some Confusing questions ，my rabbitmq always blocked beacause many messages doesn't get “ack” ，but I don't know what exactly messages cause it blocking. So I want to ask is there any way to find what mesaages make the block ?
If a message is not acknowledged (rejected) with requeue it goes back to its original position in the queue (or closer to the head of the queue).
This means that your next dequeue would return the same message which may be problematic. If this is your case you could requeue the message and ack the original in order to "move" the problematic message to the back of the queue.
You may also have an additional problem of thrashing your queue when you have only "problematic" messages remaining.
Perhaps this may shed some light: Where does a BasicReject with requeue actually go?
I have observed RabbitMQ "stuck" with unacked messages. The queue shows a consumer which no longer exists, and I assume what's happening is that RabbitMQ is continuing to deliver messages to that consumer. They show as an ever-increasing count of unacked messages. I'm doing this in PHP with php-amqplib.
I can produce the problem by killing the consumer process (control-C on command line).
I tried specifying a heartbeat of 3 seconds and tried keep-alive both true and false. With heartbeat, the consumer will eventually fail:
Exception fwrite(): send of 573 bytes failed with errno=32 Broken pipe
PhpAmqpLib\Wire\IO\StreamIO->error_handler(8, 'fwrite(): send ...',
php-amqplib/PhpAmqpLib/Wire/IO/StreamIO.php(281): fwrite(Resource id #176, '\x01\x00\x01\x00\x00\x00\x15\x00<\x00(\x00\x00\fb...', 8192)
Issue #374 might relate: https://github.com/php-amqplib/php-amqplib/issues/374
The consumer is consuming from multiple queues, but I believe that shouldn't matter.
The problem I'm trying to solve is that RabbitMQ continues to think that a consumer exists when it doesn't, with the result that RabbitMQ delivers those messages nowhere, and they go unacknowledged. I'm looking for a way to get rid of that spurious connection so that those messages can be re-delivered to a live consumer. I think that's what heartbeat is for, but I haven't gotten it to work.
The first and more important think that we need to do in this case is try to "print" your content message, and only return true to consumer. Don't process your real code, if you can "consume" the messages the problem isn't in rabbit but in our process, because probably we expend to much time to acknowledge message to rabbit and Rabbit closes our connections.
I'm not saying that its you case, but I'm just trying to help debugging the problem.
In my case I change the approach of this problem, because I have many product ids(my case) for each message and its expend long time to ACK process cause they reach database, I fit my messages and it works well after do that.
We can change the approach like create another queues to fit this messages, I don't know, but 90% of problems is it.
You can read more about Detecting Dead TCP Connections with Heartbeats here
I need the broker to delete all messages that dont have any consumers waiting. I seem to recall that this should be a default behavior, shouldn't it?
There are two approcahes to define a time-to-live for ativeMQ messages,if in this time period message is not consumed then it will expire.
you can have two approaches for this
producer.setTimeToLive(Long timeToLiveInMilliSeconds)
Above approach will apply to all messages from this producer or if you want for specific messages you can do it like this
producer.send(Destination destination,Message message,int deliveryMode,int priority,long timeToLive)
apart from this,there is no default configuration that message gets deleted as soon as it is placed on a queue and there is no consumer for that queue
hope this helps!
Good luck!
I'm trying to achieve load balancing between different types of messages. I would not know in advance what the messages coming in might be until they hit the queue. I know I can try resequencing the messages, but I was thinking that maybe if there was a way to have the various consumers round robin between either queues or between topics, this would solve my problem.
The main problem i'm trying to solve is that I have many services sending messages to one queue with many consumers feeding off one queue. I do not want one type of service monopolizing the entire worker cluster. Again I don't know in advance what the messages that are going to hit the queue are going to be.
To try to clearly repeat my question:
Is there a way to tell the consumers to round robin between either existing queues or topics?
Thank you in advance.
I found the answer to my question on another post just had to know to look there. I resolved my problem by not creating AMQ consumer but a JMS listener with a composite destination as specified in this post: jms-listener-dynamically-choose-destinations. It turns out the JMS listener automatically round robins though all the queues you assign to it.
Consumers on a Queue will already do round robin processing of the messages on the Queue. The one thing to keep in mind is consumer prefetch which can allow one consumer to grab many messages before others arrive on the Queue so you may need to adjust prefetch depending on your scenario.
Read up on the differences between Queue and Topic here.