RabbitMQ: dropping messages when no consumers are connected - rabbitmq

I'm trying to setup RabbitMQ in a model where there is only one producer and one consumer, and where messages sent by the producer are delivered to the consumer only if the consumer is connected, but dropped if the consumer is not present.
Basically I want the queue to drop all the messages it receives when no consumer is connected to it.
An additional constraint is that the queue must be declared on the RabbitMQ server side, and must not be explicitly created by the consumer or the producer.
Is that possible?
I've looked at a few things, but I can't seem to make it work:
durable vs non-durable does not work, because it is only useful when the broker restarts. I need the same effect but on a connection.
setting auto_delete to true on the queue means that my client can never connect to this queue again.
x-message-ttl and max-length make it possible to lose message even when there is a consumer connected.
I've looked at topic exchanges, but as far as I can tell, these only affect the routing of messages between the exchange and the queue based on the message content, and can't take into account whether or not a queue has connected consumers.
The effect that I'm looking for would be something like auto_delete on disconnect, and auto_create on connect. Is there a mechanism in rabbitmq that lets me do that?

After a bit more research, I discovered that one of the assumptions in my question regarding x-message-ttl was wrong. I overlooked a single sentence from the RabbitMQ documentation:
Setting the TTL to 0 causes messages to be expired upon reaching a queue unless they can be delivered to a consumer immediately
https://www.rabbitmq.com/ttl.html
It turns out that the simplest solution is to set x-message-ttl to 0 on my queue.

You can not doing it directly, but there is a mechanism not dificult to implement.
You have to enable the Event Exchange Plugin. This is a exchange at which your server app can connect and will receive internal events of RabbitMQ. You would be interested in the consumer.created and consumer.deleted events.
When these events are received you can trigger an action (create or delete the queue you need). More information here: https://www.rabbitmq.com/event-exchange.html
Hope this helps.

If your consumer is allowed to dynamically bind / unbind a queue during start/stop on the broker it should be possible by that way (e.g. queue is pre setup and the consumer binds the queue during startup to an exchange it wants to receive messages from)

Related

RabbitMQ - Move messages before deleting a queue

Using RabbitMQ 3.7.16, with spring-amqp 2.2.3.RELEASE.
Multiple clients publish messages to the DataExchange topic exchange in our RabbitMQ server, using a unique routing key. In the absence of any bindings, the exchange will route all the messaged to the data.queue.generic through the AE.
When a certain client (client ID 1 and 2 in the diagram) publishes lots of messages, in order to scale the consumption of their messages independently from other clients, we are starting consumers and assign them to only handle a their client ID. To achieve this, each client-consumer is defining a new queue, and it binds it to the topic exchange with the routing key events.<clientID>.
So scaling up is covered and works well.
Now when the messages rate for this client goes down, we would like to also scale down its consumers, up to the point of removing all of them. The intention is to then have all those messages being routed to the GenericExchange, where there's a pool of generic consumers taking care of them.
The problem is that if I delete data.queue.2 (in order to remove its binding which will lead to new messages being routed to the GenericExchange) all its pending messages will be lost.
Here's a simplified architecture view:
It would be an acceptable solution to let the messages expire with a TTL in the client queue, and then dead letter them to the generic exchange, but then I also need to stop the topic exchange from routing new messages to this "dying" queue.
So what options do I have to stop the topic exchange from routing messages to the client queue where now there's no consumer connected to it?
Or to explore another path - how to dead letter messages in a deleted/expired queue?
If the client queue is the only one with a matching binding as your explanation seems to suggest, you can just remove the binding between the exchange and the queue.
From then on, all new messages for the client will go through the alternate exchange, your "generic exchange", to be processed by your generic consumers.
As for the messages left over in the client queue, you could use a shovel to send them back to the topic exchange, for them to be routed to the generic exchange.
This based on the assumption the alternate exchange is internal. If it's not internal, you can target it directly with the shovel.
As discussed with Bogdan, another option to resolve this while ensuring no message loss is occuring is to perform multiple steps:
remove the binding between the specific queue and the exchange
have some logic to have the remaining messages be either consumed or rerouted to the generic queue
if the binding removal occurs prior to the consumer(s) disconnect, have the last consumer disconnect only once the queue is empty
if the binding removal occurs after the last consumer disconnect, then have a TTL on messages with alternate exchange as the generic exchange
depending on the options selected before, have some cleanup mecanism to remove the lingering empty queues

RabbitMQ: Publishing message when consumer is down and later consumer can't consume message without named queue

I have a producer and a consumer. Multiple instances of the consumer are running. When producer publishes a message, my intention is to consume the message by all the instances. So, I am using the direct exchange. Producer publishes a message to the direct exchange with a topic. Consumers are listening to that topic with the exclusive queue. This process is working fine when the consumer is up and producer publishes a message. But when consumers are down and producer publishes a message, consumers are not consuming this message when up.
I googled about the issue. A suggestion was to use named queue. But if I use named queue, messages will be consumed following the round-robin algorithm. That does not meet my expectation to consume the same message by all the consumers.
Is there any other solution?
Appreciated your help.
There are two solutions to your issue.
Using named queue is one of them.
Set your exchange in fanout mode and subscribe your named queues to it. Doing so, when a publisher send a message in your exchange, it will be dispatched to all the queues listening.
You can then have one or more consumer for each queue (allowing you to scale). You'll have to define a named queue / consumer. When one consumer disconnect, his queue still receive messages and when he comes back he can consume them.
You should be able to do what you want that way.
The other way is more for your personnal knowledge since you said you want to use RabbitMQ. But in that particular case you could use Kafkha, your consummer could then, after reconnection, resume at the message index he was when he disconnected.
Please update me if it doesn't work :)

RabbitMQ - Find out on publisher side that a message has been acknowledged by the consumer(s)

I am using RabbitMQ as a MQ broker. Is it possible to get a notification that a certain message has been acknowledged by all queues? That is, if it was sent to 5 queues, we get a notification after the acknowledgment of the last/5th consumer.
I know you can introduce reply-to queues, but that's not what I am looking for. I don't want to force the consumer to send an acknowledgment message to some queue after acknowledgment.
Is it also possible to continue this follow-up after a broker and/or publisher restart?
No, it is not possible as you state it.
You cannot, from the publisher side, know whether a message has been ACK'd at the consumer side, and in most patterns it's not really something you'd want anyway.
You can, however, use Publisher Confirms. These would inform the publisher that the message has been routed to all the bound queues.
There are several mechanisms for data safety on both the publisher and consumer side. You would normally trust that the broker does not miss messages in between, the same way you trust that a database will hold the records over time.
If nevertheless your workflow requires that your publisher side is informed about the completion of a complex distributed task, and you really can't get away with fire and forget, then you will need to implement that response yourself, normally by means of an additional message.

RabbitMQ same message to each consumer

I have implemented the example from the RabbitMQ website:
RabbitMQ Example
I have expanded it to have an application with a button to send a message.
Now I started two consumer on two different computers.
When I send the message the first message is sent to computer1, then the second message is sent to computer2, the thrid to computer1 and so on.
Why is this, and how can I change the behavior to send each message to each consumer?
Why is this
As noted by Yazan, messages are consumed from a single queue in a round-robin manner. The behavior your are seeing is by design, making it easy to scale up the number of consumers for a given queue.
how can I change the behavior to send each message to each consumer?
To have each consumer receive the same message, you need to create a queue for each consumer and deliver the same message to each queue.
The easiest way to do this is to use a fanout exchange. This will send every message to every queue that is bound to the exchange, completely ignoring the routing key.
If you need more control over the routing, you can use a topic or direct exchange and manage the routing keys.
Whatever type of exchange you choose, though, you will need to have a queue per consumer and have each message routed to each queue.
you can't it's controlled by the server check Round-robin dispatching section
It decides which consumer turn is. i'm not sure if there is a set of algorithms you can pick from, but at the end server will control this (i think round robin algorithm is default)
unless you want to use routing keys and exchanges
I would see this more as a design question. Ideally, producers should create the exchanges and the consumers create the queues and each consumer can create its own queue and hook it up to an exchange. This makes sure every consumer gets its message with its private queue.
What youre doing is essentially 'worker queues' model which is used to distribute tasks among worker nodes. Since each task needs to be performed only once, the message is sent to only one node. If you want to send a message to all the nodes, you need a different model called 'pub-sub' where each message is broadcasted to all the subscribers. The following link shows a simple pub-sub tutorial
https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/tutorial-three-python.html

RabbitMQ Work Queue Configuration Questions

I have two questions about RabbitMQ Work Queues:
As I understand it from the RabbitMQ tutorials, it seems that if I have a basic queue consumer client (just a basic "Hello, World!" consumer) and then I add a second consumer client for the same queue, then RabbitMQ will automatically dispatch the messages between those two queues in a round robin manner. Is that true (without adding in any extra configuration)?
My consumer clients are configured to only ever receive one message at a time, using (GetResponse response = channel.basicGet("my_queue", false). Since I am only ever receiving one message at a time, is it still necessary to set a prefetchCount (channel.basicQos(1)) for fair dispatch?
Answers to your questions:
Yes
No
However, your two questions 1 and 2 are not compatible. If you are using a consumer, it is designed to have messages pushed to it, and you don't use Basic.Get. When you use a consumer, you will need to use Basic.QoS to specify that the consumer can only "own" one unacknowledged message at a time. RabbitMQ will not push additional messages beyond the QoS limit.
Your alternative is to "pull" from the queue using Basic.Get, and you will control your own destiny as far as how many messages you run at a time.
Does this make sense?