Suspecting duplicate message from RabbitMQ - rabbitmq

i have service which uses NServiceBus to communicate with other services.
My problem is that i am supposed to get X amount of messages and i get X+1 or X+2 or X+3.
This problem occurs when the service is using multiple threads, but when i force this service to use a single thread, i do not have this issue.
I am suspecting RabbitMQ 'thinks' the message failed and resends it, or some other rabbit mechanism is at work here that sends me extra messages.
Are my suspicions valid?
Thank you.
Edit:
I now clearly see that i get the same message twice.

Related

RabbitMQ: how to handle unwanted duplicate un-ack message after connection lost?

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.

rabbitMQ unable to get heartbeat working with php-amqplib

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

Immediate flag in RabbitMQ

I have a clients that uses API. The API sends messeges to rabbitmq. Rabbitmq to workers.
I ought to reply to clients if somethings went wrong - message wasn't routed to a certain queue and wasn't obtained for performing at this time ( full confirmation )
A task who is started after 5-10 seconds does not make sense.
Appropriately, I must use mandatory and immediate flags.
I can't increase counts of workers, I can't run workers on another servers. It's a demand.
So, as I could find the immediate flag hadn't been supporting since rabbitmq v.3.0x
The developers of rabbitmq suggests to use TTL=0 for a queue instead but then I will not be able to check status of message.
Whether any opportunity to change that behavior? Please, share your experience how you solved problems like this.
Thank you.
I'm not sure, but after reading your original question in Russian, it might be that using both publisher and consumer confirms may be what you want. See last three paragraphs in this answer.
As you want to get message result for published message from your worker, it looks like RPC pattern is what you want. See RabbitMQ RPC tuttorial. Pick a programming language section there you most comfortable with, overall concept is the same. You may also find Direct reply-to useful.
It's not the same as immediate flag functionality, but in case all your publishers operate with immediate scenario, it might be that AMQP protocol is not the best choice for such kind of task. Immediate mean "deliver this message right now or burn in hell" and it might be a situation when you publish more than you can process. In such cases RPC + response timeout may be a good choice on application side (e.g. socket timeout). But it doesn't work well for non-idempotent RPC calls while message still be processed, so you may want to use per-queue or per-message TTL (or set queue length limit). In case message will be dead-lettered, you may get it there (in case you need that for some reason).
TL;DR
As to "something" can go wrong, it can go so on different levels which we for simplicity define as:
before RabbitMQ, like sending application failure and network problems;
inside RabbitMQ, say, missed destination queue, message timeout, queue length limit, some hard and unexpected internal error;
after RabbitMQ, in most cases - messages processing application error or some third-party services like data persistence or caching layer outage.
Some errors like network outage or hardware error are a bit epic and are not a subject of this q/a.
Typical scenario for guaranteed message delivery is to use publisher confirms or transactions (which are slower). After you got a confirm it mean that RabbitMQ got your message and if it has route - placed in a queue. If not it is dropped OR if mandatory flag set returned with basic.return method.
For consumers it's similar - after basic.consumer/basic.get, client ack'ed message it considered received and removed from queue.
So when you use confirms on both ends, you are protected from message loss (we'll not run into a situation that there might be some bug in RabbitMQ itself).
Bogdan, thank you for your reply.
Seems, I expressed my thought enough clearly.
Scheme may looks like this. Each component of system must do what it must do :)
The an idea is make every component more simple.
How to task is performed.
Clients goes to HTTP-API with requests and must obtain a respones like this:
Positive - it have put to queue
Negative - response with error and a reason
When I was talking about confirmation I meant that I must to know that a message is delivered ( there are no free workers - rabbitmq can remove a message ), a client must be notified.
A sent message couldn't be delivered to certain queue, a client must be notified.
How to a message is handled.
Messages is sent for performing.
Status of perfoming is written into HeartBeat
Status.
Clients obtain status from HeartBeat by itself and then decide that
it's have to do.
I'm not sure, that RPC may be useful for us i.e. RPC means that clients must to wait response from server. Tasks may works a long time. Excess bound between clients and servers, additional logic on client-side.
Limited size of queue maybe not useful too.
Possible situation when a size of queue maybe greater than counts of workers. ( problem in configuration or defined settings ).
Then an idea with 5-10 seconds doesn't make sense.
TTL doesn't usefull because of:
Setting the TTL to 0 causes messages to be expired upon reaching a
queue unless they can be delivered to a consumer immediately. Thus
this provides an alternative to basic.publish's immediate flag, which
the RabbitMQ server does not support. Unlike that flag, no
basic.returns are issued, and if a dead letter exchange is set then
messages will be dead-lettered.
direct reply-to :
The RPC server will then see a reply-to property with a generated
name. It should publish to the default exchange ("") with the routing
key set to this value (i.e. just as if it were sending to a reply
queue as usual). The message will then be sent straight to the client
consumer.
Then I will not be able to route messages.
So, I'm sorry. I may flounder in terms i.e. I'm new in AMQP and rabbitmq.

MassTransit with RabbitMQ: When is a message moved to the error queue

I am using RabbitMQ version 3.0.2 & I see close to 1000 message in Error queue. I want to know
At what point messages are moved to the error queues?
Is there a way to know why a certain message is being moved to an error queue?
Is there any way to move message from error queue to normal queue?
Thank you
a) they fail to deserialize or b) the consumer throws an exception processing that message five times
Not really... If you peek at the message in the queue, the payload headers might contain a note but I don't think we did that. If you turn logging on (NLog, log4net, etc) you should be able to see the exceptions in your log. You'll have to correlate message ids at that point to figure out exactly why.
There is no built in way via MassTransit. Mostly because there doesn't seem to be a great, generic way to handle this. Everyone wants some process around this. Dru did create a BusDriver app (in the main MT source repo) that could be used to move messages back to the exchange in question. This default behaviour is there so you at least know things have been failing if you don't put in the infrastructure to handle it.
To add to Travis' answer, During my development I found some other reasons for messages going onto the error queue:
The published message type has no consumer
A SAGA and a consumer are expecting the same concrete message type. Even if you try and differentiate using "Accepts" and ".Selected", both a SAGA and a Consumer should not be programmed to receive the same message type.

"Unknown delivery tag" from RabbitMQ when ack'ing a message in a cluster with replicated queues

We've been using Rabbit successfully for about a year. Recently have upgraded to v2.6.1, because we want to use clusters with replicated message queues.
My testing has hit a puzzling behavior that smells like a Rabbit bug to me. The test that uncovers this is working with a two-node cluster. Both nodes are running v2.6.1. Both nodes have disk. Both nodes are running on Mac OS, though I doubt this is pertinent.
I'm also running Alice on the node that runs the test. The test uses it to programmatically do a stop_app on one of the nodes, because the test is trying to validate that if the cluster master fails, and a slave is elevated to take its place, that we don't lose messages.
So, the test has a small thread pool, which is given tasks that periodically 1) publish messages, and 2) toggle the state of the Rabbit master node (stopped if running; started if stopped). Other threads are consuming messages from queues.
I'm using publisher confirms, and I'm also acknowledging the messages in the consumers (using autoAck=false for channel.basicConsume()).
When the master node is stopped, I see both the producers and consumers catching ShutdownSignalException. They handle this by attempting to reconnect to the cluster. This works fine. When reconnected, they continue with their business.
Sometimes, what I see is that a consumer has successfully fetched a message from the broker, and is calling channel.basicAck() when it gets that ShutdownSignalException.
Later, when the consumer has reconnected, it again pulls down the same message. (The message bodies are tagged with a UUID, so I know it is the same one.) This time, when the consumer attempts to basicAck() the message, it again gets ShutdownSignalException, but this one has the following text in it: "reply-text=PRECONDITION_FAILED - unknown delivery tag 7".
In fact, that is the same delivery tag that was offered to the consumer by the broker before the master went down and the consumer reconnected.
Googling suggests that this event means that the consumer is attempting to ack the same message more than once.
But, how can this be so? If the first ack succeeded, then the message should have been removed from the broker's queues, and the consumer shouldn't see the same message again.
Yet, if the first ack did not succeed, then the consumer shouldn't be dinged for attempting to re-ack the message.
Anyone seen this before? It smells like a bug in Rabbit's replicated queues to me, but I've still new to Rabbit, and so am willing to believe there's a subtlety here in consuming from a clustered broker that I haven't yet grokked!
Thanks, --Steve
I'm not sure if my case matching yours, but I have seen similar "unknown delivery tag" on attempts to ack after reconnect and then the same message arrived again. Initially it looked like a bug to me, but in fact this is expected behavior. Consumer with QOS>1 may have in it's local buffer some messages and delivery tag will be invalid for all o them after reconnect. From another hand, attempt to ack even the current message after reconnect doesn't make any sense, because that message already nacked automatically on connection lost and this is why I got it again.