How to use NServiceBus.FLRetries header (NSB 5.2) - nservicebus

I have a PowerShell script that replays the MSMQ messages from an error queue. I was hoping that NServiceBus.FLRetries updates with further failures. However this is not the case.
I have read the documentation but unable to fully understand this particular header.
What I would like to see is the number of retries increase as the message continue to fail to process (e.g. web service not available).
I am using NSB 5.2.
Any ideas how I can model this if the above header is not usable.

Unfortunately, this won't work.
NServiceBus implements First level retries(FLR) by rolling the receive transaction against the queue back if there is an exception. Rolling the transaction back means the message "never left" the queue in the first place. You can't thus modify the message, including adding/updating any headers like NServiceBus.FLRetries. NServiceBus keeps track of this count in-memory instead.
If the message keeps failing and is moved to Second Level Retries(SLR), NServiceBus will add the NServiceBus.FLRetries header to show how many FLR retries were attempted in total.
If you really need to keep track of the number of retries you can disable FLR and use only SLR instead. SLR retries increment the NServiceBus.Retries header for each retry since they don't rely on rolling the receive transaction back.

Related

ActiveMQ: How do I limit the number of messages being dispatched?

Let's say I have one ActiveMQ Broker and an undefined numbers of consumers.
Problem:
To process a message, consumers need an external service which is either "DATA1" or "DATA2" (specified in the message)
Each server, "DATA1" and "DATA2", can only handle 20 connections
So at most 20 "DATA1" and 20 "DATA2" messages must be dispatched at any time
Because of priorization, the messages must be enqueued in the same queue
Even if message A has a higher prio than message B, if A can't be processed because the external service has no free slots, message B needs to be processed instead
How can this be solved? As long as I was using message pulling (prefetch of 0), I was able to do this by using a BrokerPlugin that, on messagePull, achieved this by using semaphores and selectors. If the limits were reached, the pull returned null.
However, due to performance issues I had to set prefetch to 1 and use push instead. Therefore, my messagePull hack no longer works (it's never called).
So far I'm considering implementing a custom Cursor but I was wondering if someone knows a better solution.
Update the custom cursor worked but broke features like message removal. I tried with a custom Queue and QueueDispatchSelector (which is a pain to configure since there isn't a proper API to do so) and it mostly works but I still have synchronisation issues.
Also, a very suitable API seems to be DispatchPolicy, however, while it is referenced by Queue, it's never used.
Queues give you buffering for system processing time for free. Messages are delivered on demand. With prefetch=0 or prefetch=1, should effectively get you there. Messages will only be delivered to a consumer when the consumer is ready (ie.. during the consumer.receive() method).
consumer.receive() is a blocking call, so you should not need any custom plugin or other to delay delivery until the consumer process (and its required downstream services) are ready to handle it.
The behavior should work out-of-the-box, or there are some details to your use case that are not provided to shed more light on the scenario.

Mule ESB: How to achieve typical ReTry Mechanism in MULE ESB

I need to implement a logic on Retry. Inbound endpoint pushes the messages to Rest (Outbound). If the REST is unavailable, I need to retry for 1 time and put it in the queue. But the second upcoming messages should not do any retry, it has to directly put the messages in to queue until the REST service is available.
Once the service is available, I need to pushes all the messages from QUEUE to REST Service (in ordering) via batch job.
Questions:
How do I know the service is unavailable for my second message? If I use until Successful, for every message it do retry and put in queue. Plm is 2nd message shouldn't do retry.
For batch, I thought of using poll, but how to tell to poll, when the service becomes available to begin the batch process. (bcz,Poll is more of with configuring timings to run batch)?
Other ticky confuses me is - Here ordering has to be preserved. once the service is available. Queue messages ( i,e Batch) has to move first to REST Services then with real time. I doubt whether Is it applicable.
It will be very helpful for the quick response to implement the logic.
Using Mule: 3.5.1
I could try something like below: using flow controls
process a message; if exception or bad response code, set a variable/property like serviceAvailable=false.
subsequent message processing will first check the property serviceAvailable to process the messages. if property is false, en-queue the messages to a DB table with status=new/unprocessed
create a flow/scheduler to process the messages from DB sequentially, but it will not check the property serviceAvailable and call the rest service.
If service throws exception it will not store the messages in db again but if processes successfully change the property serviceAvailable=true and de-queue the messages or change the status. Add another property and set it to true if there are more messages in db table like moreDBMsg=true.
New messages should not be processed/consumed until moreDBMsg=false
once moreDBMsg=false and serviceAvailable=true start processing the messages from queue.
For the timeout I would still look at the response code and catch time-outs to determine if the call was successful or requires a retry. Practically you normally do multi threading anyway, so you have multiple calls in parallel anyway. Or simply one call starts before the other ends.
That is just quite normal.
But you can simply retry calls in a queue that time out. And after x amounts of time-outs you "skip" or defer the retry.
But all of this has been done using actual Mule flow components like either:
MEL http://www.mulesoft.org/documentation/display/current/Mule+Expression+Language+Reference
Or flow controls: http://www.mulesoft.org/documentation/display/current/Choice+Flow+Control+Reference
Or for example you reference a Spring Bean and do it in native Java code.
One possibility for the queue would be to persist it in a database. Mule has database connector that has a "poll" feature, see: http://www.mulesoft.org/documentation/display/current/JDBC+Transport+Reference#JDBCTransportReference-PollingTransport

How to specify another timeout queue for NSB?

I am using NSB 4.4.2
I want to have something like heartbeats on my saga to show processing statistics.
When i request a timeout it sends to sagas input queue.
In case of many messages prior to this timeout message, IHandleTimeouts may not be fired at specific time.
Is it a bug? Or how can i use separate queue for timeout messages?
Thanks
You are correct - when a timeout is ready to be dispatched, it is sent to the incoming queue of the endpoint, and if there are already many other messages in there, it will have to wait its turn to be processed.
Another thing you might want to consider, is that the endpoint may be down at that time.
If you want to guarantee that your saga code will be invoked at (or very close to) the time of the timeout, you'll need to set up a high availability deployment first. Then, you should look at setting the SLA required of that endpoint - how quickly messages should be processed, and then monitor the time to breach SLA performance counter.
See here for more information: http://docs.particular.net/nservicebus/monitoring-nservicebus-endpoints
You should be prepared to scale out your endpoint as needed to guarantee enough processing power to keep up with the load coming in.
NOTE: The reason we use the same incoming queue for processing these timeouts is by design. A timeout message is almost always the same priority or lower than the other business messages being processed by a saga. As such, it doesn't make sense to have them cut ahead of other messages in line.
Timeouts are sent to the [endpointname].timeouts

NServiceBus delay retries

We need to be able to specify a delay in retrying failed messages. NServiceBus retries more or less instantly up to n times (as configured) before moving the message to error queue.
What I need to be able to do is for a given message type specify that its not to be retried for an arbitrary period of time
I've read the post here:
NServiceBus Retry Delay
but this doesn't give what I'm looking for.
Kind regards
Ben
This isn't supported as of right now. What you can do is let the messages go to the error queue and setup and endpoint to monitor that queue. Your code could then determine the rules for replaying messages. You could use a Saga to achieve this in combination with the Timeout manager.
Typically you'll have some rules around when to replay messages. In NSB 3.0 we have a better way to do this using the FaultManager. This gives you options on where to put failed messages and includes the exception. One of the options is a DB which you could then set up a job to inspect the exception and determine what to do with it.
Lastly a low tech way of getting this is to schedule a job that runs the ReturnToSourceQueue tool periodically to "clean up". We are doing this and including an alert so we don't endlessly cycle messages around.

NServiceBus Retry Delay

What is the optimal way to configure/code NServiceBus to delay retrying messages?
In its default configuration retry happens almost immediately up to the number of attempts defined in the configuration file. I'd ideally like to retry again after an hour, etc.
Also, how does HandleCurrentMessageLater() work? What does the Later aspect refer to?
The NSB retries is there to remedy temporary problems like deadlocks etc. Longer retries is better handled by creating another process that monitors the error queue and puts them back into to the source queue at the interval you like. Take a look at the ReturnToSourceQueue.exe that comes with NSB for reference.
Edit: NServiceBus now supports this , we call it Second Level Retries, see http://docs.particular.net/ for more details
Here is a blog post on why NServiceBus doesn't include a retry delay that I wrote after asking Udi this very same question in his distributed systems architecture course:
NServiceBus Retries: Why no back-off delay?
And here is a discussion thread covering some of the points involved in building an error queue monitor/retry endpoint:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/nservicebus/message/10964
As far as HandleCurrentMessageLater(), all that does is puts the current message back at the end of the queue. If there are no other messages waiting, it's going to be processed again immediately.
As of NServiceBus 3.2.1, they provide an out of the box solution to handle back off delays in the event of consecutive message failures. The previously existing retry mechanism still retries failures without a delay to handle cases like Database deadlocks, quickly self healing network issues, etc.
Once a message has been retried the configured number of times, the message is moved to a "Second Level Retry" queue. This queue, as configured below, will retry after a 10, 20, and 30 second delay, then the message will be moved to the configured error queue. You're free to change these values to something that better suites your environment.
You can also check out this link:
http://docs.particular.net/nservicebus/second-level-retries