I'm using a RabbitMQ broker, and there is a Celery worker which is subscribed to the broker. From my testing, it looks like RabbitMQ treats messages in FIFO order. Because one queue has been populated, then another, then another, and so on, my worker consumes all the messages from queue 1, and only moves on to queue 2 once it is done with queue 1.
Is it possible to change this behavior? I would like the Celery worker to consume in a round-robin style instead, ie consume a message from queue 1, then a message from queue 2, and so on, only coming back to queue 1 once a message has been consumed from each of the other queues.
Yes, you have to reduce your prefetch_count to 1 so only 1 message is fetched at a time. In Celery you can archive this by setting CELERYD_PREFETCH_MULTIPLIER to 1. You may also want to set task_acks_late = True, make sure you read the documentation on both.
from the Celery docs:
To disable prefetching, set worker_prefetch_multiplier to 1. Changing
that setting to 0 will allow the worker to keep consuming as many
messages as it wants.
Related
I have a RabbitMQ setup in which jobs are sent to an exchange, which passes them to a queue. A consumer carries out the jobs from the queue correctly in turn. However, these jobs are long processes (several minutes at least). For scalability, I need to be able to have multiple consumers picking a job from the top of the queue and executing it.
The consumer is running on a Heroku dyno called 'queue'. When I scale the dyno, it appears to create additional consumers for each dyno (I can see these on the RabbitMQ dashboard). However, the number of tasks in the queue is unchanged - the extra consumers appear to be doing nothing. Please see the picture below to understand my setup.
Am I missing something here?
Why are the consumers showing as 'idle'? I know from my logs that at least one consumer is actively working through a task.
How can my consumer utilisation be 0% when at least one consumer is definitely working hard.
How can I make the other three consumers actually pull some jobs from the queue?
Thanks
EDIT: I've discovered that the round robin dispatching is actually working, but only if the additional consumers are already running when the messages are sent to the queue. This seems like counterintuitive behaviour to me. If I saw a large queue and wanted to add more consumers, the added consumers would do nothing until more items are added to the queue.
To pick out the key point from the other answer, the likely culprit here is pre-fetching, as described under "Consumer Acknowledgements and Publisher Confirms".
Rather than delivering one message at a time and waiting for it to be acknowledged, the server will send batches to the consumer. If the consumer acknowledges some but then crashes, the remaining messages will be sent to a different consumer; but if the consumer is still running, the unacknowledged messages won't be sent to any new consumer.
This explains the behaviour you're seeing:
You create the queue, and deliver some messages to it, with no consumer running.
You run a single consumer, and it pre-fetches all the messages on the queue.
You run a second consumer; although the queue isn't empty, all the messages are marked as sent to the first consumer, awaiting acknowledgement; so the second consumer sits idle.
A new message arrives in the queue; it is distributed in round-robin fashion to the second consumer.
The solution is to specify the basic.qos option in the consumer. If you set this to 1, RabbitMQ won't send a message to a consumer until it has acknowledged the previous message; multiple consumers with that setting will receive messages in strictly round-robin fashion.
I am not familiar to Heroku, so I don't know how Heroku worker build rabbitMQ consumer, I just have a quick view over Heroku document.
Why are the consumers showing as 'idle'?
I think your mean the queue is 'idle'? Because the queue's state is about the queue's traffic, it just means there is not on-doing job for the queue's job thread. And it will become 'running' when a message is published in the queue.
How can my consumer utilisation be 0% when at least one consumer is definitely working hard.
The same as queue state, from official explanation, consumer utilisation too low means:
There were more consumers
The consumers were faster
The consumers had a higher prefetch count
In your situation, prefetch_count = 0 means no limits on prefetch, so it's too large. And Messages.total = Messages.unacked = 78 means your consumer is too slow, there are two many messages have been processed by consumer.
So if your message rate is not large enough, the state and consumer utilisation field of the queue is useless.
If I saw a large queue and wanted to add more consumers, the added consumers would do nothing until more items are added to the queue.
Because these unacked messages have already been prefetched by exist consumers, they will not be consumed by new consumers unless you requeue the unacked messages.
We're seeing an issue where consumers of our message queues are picking up messages from queues at the top of the alphabetical range. We have two applications: a producer, and a subscriber. We're using RabbitMQ 3.6.1.
Let's say that the message queues are setup like so:
Our first application, the producer, puts say 100 messages/second onto each queue:
Our second application, the subscriber, has five unique consumer methods that can deal with messages on each respective queue. Each method binds to it's respective queue. A subscriber has a prefetch of 1 meaning it can only hold one message at a time, regardless of queue. We may run numerous instances of the subscriber like so:
So the situation is thus: each queue is receiving 100 msg/sec, and we have four instances of subscriber consuming these messages, so each queue has four consumers. Let's say that the consumer methods can deal with 25 msg/sec each.
What happens is that instead of all the queues being consumed equally, the alphabetically higher queues instead get priority. It's seems as though when the subscriber becomes ready, RabbitMQ looks down the list of queues that this particular ready channel is bound to, and picks the first queue with pending messages.
In our situation, A_QUEUE will have every message consumed. B_QUEUE may have some consumed in certain race conditions, but C_QUEUE/D_QUEUE and especially E_QUEUE will rarely get touched.
If we turn off the publisher, the queues will eventually drain, top to bottom.
Is it possible to configure either RabbitMQ itself or possibly even the channel to use some sort of round robin distribution policy or maybe even random policy so that when a channel has numerous bound queues, all with messages pending, the distribution is even?
to clarify: you have a single subscriber application with multiple consumers in it, right?
I'm guessing you're using a single RabbitMQ Connection within the subscriber app.
Are you also re-using a single RabbitMQ Channel for all of your consumers? If so, that would be a problem. Be sure to use a new Channel for each consumer you start.
Maybe the picture is wrong, but if it's not then your setup is wrong. You don't need 4 queues if you are going to have subscribers that listen to each and every queue. You'd just need one queue, that has multiple instances of the same subscriber consuming from it.
Now to answer, yes (but no need to configure, as long as prefetch is 1), actually rabbitmq does distribute messages evenly. You can find about about that here, and on the same place actually how your setup should look like. Here is a quote from the link.
RabbitMQ just dispatches a message when the message enters the queue.
It doesn't look at the number of unacknowledged messages for a
consumer. It just blindly dispatches every n-th message to the n-th
consumer.
We run multiple concurrent RabbitMQ consumers each one executes “basicGet” in a loop. We see that a single consumer gets most of the messages. Is there a way to spread messages more evenly between all consumers? Basically can we somehow interrupt RabbitMQ serveing the first consumer and switch to the next in line. Note: we must pull messages (basicGet) and cannot switch to push (basicConsume) Thanks.
set a consumer prefetch limit of 1, and put the consumer into noAck: false mode.
... that may be autoAck: false, instead of noAck...
this will force your consumer to only retrieve 1 message at a time, and require you to manually ack the message.
with these two things in place, your messages should distribute across multiple consumers more evenly - assuming you have multiple messages in the queue
Lets say I have a queue with a bunch of messages in it. I have 2 consumers connected to that queue, both set with a prefetch = 1. The work that these consumers do takes some time, and I don't want to acknowledge the message until the work is done (in case the consumer crashes or something - I want the message to automatically reenter the queue in exceptional cases).
But I also want these consumers to work in parallel, and that doesn't appear to be happening. In other words, as long as there are 2+ messages in the queue, I'd expect both consumers to be busy.
What appears to be happening instead is that consumer 1 receives a message, but consumer 2 will wait until consumer 1 has acknowledged the message. Then consumer 2 receives a message and consumer 1 waits, etc.
Is there an option I'm missing? Or should this be working, I just have a bug in my code somewhere? Or is this not possible?
You should be able to pull messages off the queue while previous messages are still being processed by other consumers. The RabbitMQ tutorial specifically points to parallelism as a strength of round-robin dispatching (http://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/tutorial-two-python.html). Are your two consumers running as threads in the same process? I wonder if you've just made a mistake in the implementation.
ActiveMQ: 5.10.2 inside ServiceMix's Karaf OSGi
KahaDB persistence.
Default broker settings.
Default settings in connections(tcp://x.x.x.x:61616)
16 queues predefined in activemq.xml.
Two client connections to ActiveMQ. One for producer sessions, one for consumer sessions.
Producers send messages to all queues.
16 consumer sessions consumes messages.
All going ok, but:
If I reduce number of consumers to 1 (or 2 or three, I don't know where is threshold) so that messages from 1 queue are consuming and messages from another queues are storing.
While some time passing, I see this picture:
That 1 consumer stop receiving message. He think that there are no more messages.
From activemqweb I can see that message count on that consuming queue is > 0
From activemqweb I cannot see any messages in Message Browser in that consuming queue.
I can see messages from other queues in Message Browser.
If I start some other consumer(or restart activemq) to consume messages from different queue I see:
I start to see messages in first queue Message Browser(those that were sent before but haven't been seen after "freeze").
First queue continue to consuming
Second queue begin to consuming.
The "freeze" can occur again in some time and start consuming another queue will help again.
If I start all consumers I see no "message freeze".
If just stop and start consumer on "frozen" queue, nothing happens. It need to be done on "unfrozen queue" to "unfroze" "frozen queue".
It also happens if there is no active producer, only consumer.
What can it be?
Thank you.
Oups. I've found what it was.
It's just available memory exceeded.
I didn't set -Xms and -Xmx, so it run with only 512mb of max heap.
And when messages size stored and not consumed is closed to the top, I get these behavior.