How can I trigger message duplication in RabbitMQ for testing? - rabbitmq

The RabbitMQ documentation says, that duplication of messages could happen, and the consumer must handle this. In order to test the appropriate code, I'd like to make RabbitMQ produce these duplicate messages, with the redelivered flag set accordingly. How can I do this?

With default configuration, if you throw an exception from the listener, it will be redelivered - if you have multiple consumers on the queue, there is no guarantee the same instance will get the redelivery.

Related

Resiliently processing messages from RabbitMQ

I'm not sure how to resiliently handle RabbitMQ messages in the event of an intermittent outage.
I subscribe in a windows service, read the message, then store it my database. If I can't process the record because of the data I publish it to a dead letter queue for a human to address and reprocess.
I am not sure what to do if I have some intermittent technical issue that will fix itself (database reboot, network outage, drive space, etc). I don't want hundreds of messages showing up on dead letter that just needed to wait for a for a glitch but now would be waiting on a human.
Currently, I re-queue the event and retry it once, but it retries so fast the issue is not usually resolved. I thought of retrying forever but I don't want a real issue to get stuck in an infinite loop.
Is a broad topic but from the server side you could persist your messages and make your queues durable, this means that in the eventuality the server gets restarted they won't be lost, check more here How to persist messages during RabbitMQ broker restart?
For the consumer (client) it will depend on how you configure your client, from the docs:
In the event of network failure (or a node crashing), messages can be duplicated, and consumers must be prepared to handle them. If possible, the simplest way to handle this is to ensure that your consumers handle messages in an idempotent way rather than explicitly deal with deduplication.
If a message is delivered to a consumer and then requeued (because it was not acknowledged before the consumer connection dropped, for example) then RabbitMQ will set the redelivered flag on it when it is delivered again (whether to the same consumer or a different one). This is a hint that a consumer may have seen this message before (although that's not guaranteed, the message may have made it out of the broker but not into a consumer before the connection dropped). Conversely if the redelivered flag is not set then it is guaranteed that the message has not been seen before. Therefore if a consumer finds it more expensive to deduplicate messages or process them in an idempotent manner, it can do this only for messages with the redelivered flag set.
Check more here: https://www.rabbitmq.com/reliability.html#consumer

rabbitmq: can consumer persist message change before nack?

Before a consumer nacks a message, is there any way the consumer can modify the message's state so that when the consumer consumes it upon redelivery, it sees that changed state. I'd rather not reject + reenqueue new message, but please let me know if that's the only way to accomplish this.
My goal is to determine how many times specific messages are being redelivered. I see two ways of doing this:
(1) On the message itself as described above. The message would be a container of basic stats and the application payload message.
(2) In some external storage. We would uniquely identify the message by the message id that we set.
I know 2 is possible, but my question is if 1 is possible.
There is no way to do (1) like you want. You would need to change the message, thus the message would become another message. If you want to do something like that (and it's possible that you meant this with I'd rather not reject + reenqueue new message) - you should ACK the message, increment one field in it and publish it again (again, maybe this is what you meant when you said reenqueue it). So your message payload would have some ID, counter, and again (obviously different) payload that is the content.
Definitvly much better way is (2) for multiple reasons:
it does not interfere with business logic, that is this diagnostic part is isolated
you are leaving re-queueing to rabbitmq (as you are supposed to do), meaning that you are not worrying about losing messages and handling some message meta info which has no use for you business logic
it's actually supposed to be used - the ACKing and NACKing, that's why it's in the AMQP specification
since you do need the number of how many times specific messages have been redelivered, you have it somewhere externally, meaning that it's independent of (rabbitmq's) message persistence, lifetime, potentially queue durability mirroring etc
Even if this question was marked as solved some time ago, I want to mention that there is a way at least for the redelivery. It might be integrated after the original answer. There is a different type of queues in RabbitMQ called Quorum queues.
Quorum queues offer the option to set redelivery limit:
Quorum queues support poison message handling via a redelivery limit. This feature is currently unique to Quorum queues.
In order to archive this, RabbitMQ is counting the numbers of deliveries in the header. The header attribute is called: x-delivery-count

RabbitMQ - purge a queue from all of its unacked messages

I have thousands of unacked messages in my dev environment which I can't restart.
Is there a way to remove (purge) all messages even if they are unacknowledged?
Close the channel that the unacked messages reside on, which will nack them back into the queue, then call purge.
You have to make consumer ack them (or nack) and only after that they will be removed. Alternatively you can shutdown consumers and purge the queue completely.
If you are looking for some way to purge all unacked messages - there are no such feature nor in AMQP protocol neither in RabbitMQ.
It looks like your consumer is the cause of the problem, so you have to adjust it (rewrite) to release message immediately after it processed or failed.
Once there are no "ready" messages in the queue, delete it and recreate.
YOU WILL LOSE THE QUEUE CONTENTS with this method.
You need to put messages back into the queue before you can purge them:
close the channel
close the connection (the script doesn't work for me)
As an alternative, this doesn't require to wait:
delete and recreate the queue
restart the server
You need to call basic.recover to force all unacked messages to be re-enqueued to a channel that failed. Be aware of the errata concerning this function specifying that only the requeue mode is supported by RabbitMQ.
For software developer use below code.
channel.purgeQueue(queue-name);
if we use this code the Queue will be clear and same queue will exist.
One way this can happen is if the consumer is stuck recycling the same messages due to a processing error. In this case, the RabbitMQ queue management interface may show the messages as Unacked, but really they are being read from the queue and processed (to the point of the failure) then requeued (to enable a retry) at a rapid pace -- maybe thousands of times per second.
During this loop, the messages exist briefly in the Ready state, but are immediately removed again by you application -- and the cycle begins again. As an example, this auto-requeue behavior is the default for Spring AMQP.
Since the messages are never left in the Ready state, the Management Interface's Get Message(s) button is unlikely work. What can work, if you have queue access, is to run a separate custom consumer instance, perhaps locally, but with the specific intent of removing and not requeuing the messages in question.
By RabbitMQ's Fair Dispatch mechanism, your additional consumer will likely receive the messages in question and have the opportunity to perform your custom handling.
You might even write a custom utility to do this, with logic to filter, analyze, or deadletter the messages of interest.
If you want to clear the contents of the queue, then you can use the AMQP method queue.purge: There is queue purge in AMQP: http://www.rabbitmq.com/amqp-0-9-1-reference.html#queue.purge
You could do similar using the management plugin.

How to set a redelivery policy in RabbitMQ/AMQP

I'm currently using ActiveMQ for my queueing system, and I'm wanting to make the transition to RabbitMQ. One feature I've been using that belongs to ActiveMQ is a redelivery policy, as sometimes our consumer rejects a message because it cannot handle it at this time, but may want to try again later, so it requeues it.
Right now in AMQP, when I reject a message, it's instantly pulled off the queue again immediately and tried again.
Is there a way, in RabbitMQ, to specify a redelivery policy for a queue, consumer, or message?
I also had problems with that behaviour. According to documentation (as far as I remember, maybe in newer version something changed) after requeue it is not stated where a message will be placed (it was described as undetermined). In my testcases (with version 2.8.2) some of messages were put to the end of a queue and one message (precisely first from clients prefetch) land on beggining (and being consumed immediately). In our application this caused livelock.
You could walkaround this by publishing copy of message to a queue and acking already delivered one in one transaction (but I recommend to carefully read section about transactions in docs) or use deadlettering to deal with temporaly unprocessable messages.

How does AMQ's redeliver work? Does it hold a consumer completely during the redelivery process?

Assuming that we only have one consumer and our redelivery policy will allow the message to be redelivered for a quite long time.
I've tried a scenario where I sent two messages(different type), one is designed to be redelivered and the other can be consumed normally.
It seems the normal message will be blocked if it is delivered later than the redelivered one.
It will not be consumed until the redelivered message has tried many times reaching the maximum redeliver times. That would lead to a situation where a easy-to-consumed message must wait a long time to be consumed..
I'm wondering how the AMQ redeliver work. When a message is redelivered in a consumer, the other message can be sent to this consumer until current message has been consumed or timeout(to DLQ).
Can someone help ? Thanks,
ActiveMQ's overriding concern when redelivering messages is to honour message ordering on a queue.
Given two messages A and B, which get sent to a queue with a defined redelivery policy as you describe: if a client fails processing A, that message will get placed back on the queue and no other messages will be consumed until A is consumed successfully.
Check out the ActiveMQ Message Redelivery and DLQ Handling section for further details.
Please remember to vote this response up if it answers your question.
For this case it is possible to set the ActiveConnectionFactory to onBlockingRedelivery.
Find details in de ActiveMq Api documentation: