Auto spawn rabbit mq listener - rabbitmq

I'm working on an application where-in I have a listener on a rabbit mq queue. Depending on the kind of message, the listener goes ahead and performs a task. My problem is I need a way to spawn a new listener if a single listener isn't able to cope up with the queue. As far as I can tell, I can use the rabbitmq json api to find the len of the queue and take actions based on that. So, I write a script that checks using curl the queue length and spawns a new listener process. Am I on the right path here? Is there a better way to achieve this? I'm looking for a solution that kinda scales with load to a certain limit atleast.

Checking the RabbitMQ API to see the length of the queue is one way, and it would definitely work.
You should try to predict when the load is spiking so that you slowly can increase the number of consumers if needed, so that you don't see a sudden spike of instances spawning. Having many instances spawning simultaneously could cause unnecessary load on your system.

Related

RabbitMQ + kombu - A long callback blocks the heartbeat leading to aborting the connection

We have been trying to use RabbitMQ to transfer data from Project A to Project B.
We created a producer who takes the data from Project A and puts it in a queue, and that was relatively easy. Then, create a k8s pod for Project B, which listens to the appropriate queue with the ConsumerMixin of kombu.
Overall, the integration was reasonable and straightforward. But when we started to process long messages, we noticed that they were coming back into the queue repeatedly.
After research, we found out that whenever the processing of the message takes more than 20 seconds, the message showed up in the queue again, even though the processing was successful.
The source of this issue lies with the heartbeat of RabbitMQ. We set the heartbeat for 10 seconds, and the RabbitMQ checks the connection twice before it kills it. However, because the process of the callback takes more than 20 seconds, and the .ack() (acknowledge) of the message happens at the end of the callback (to ensure it was successful), the heartbeat is being blocked by the process of this message (as described here: https://github.com/celery/kombu/issues/621#issuecomment-251836611).
We have been trying to find a workaround with Threading, to process the message on a different thread and avoid the block of the heartbeat, but it didn't work. Also, it feels like we were trying to hack things and not solve the problem.
So my question here is if there is a proper workaround to handle this situation, or what alternatives do we have? RabbitMQ seemed like the right choice since we use it in standalone projects with Celery, and it is also recommended on the internet.

How to figure out if mule flow message processing is in progress

I have a requirement where I need to make sure only one message is being processed at a time by a mule flow.Flow is triggered by a quartz scheduler which reads one file from FTP server every time
My proposed solution is to keep a global variable "FLOW_STATUS" which will be set to "RUNNING" when a message is received and would be reset to "STOPPED" once the processing of message is done.
Any messages fed to the flow will check for this variable and abort if "FLOW_STATUS" is "RUNNING".
This setup seems to be working , but I was wondering if there is a better way to do it.
Is there any best practices around this or any inbuilt mule helper functions to achieve the same instead of relying on global variables
It seems like a more simple solution would be to set the maxActiveThreads for the flow to 1. In Mule, each message processed gets it's own thread. So setting the maxActiveThreads to 1 would effectively make your flow singled threaded. Other pending requests will wait in the receiver threads. You will need to make sure your receiver thread pool is large enough to accommodate all of the potential waiting threads. That may mean throttling back your quartz scheduler to allow time process the files so the receiver thread pool doesn't fill up. For more information on the thread pools and how to tune performance, here is a good link: http://www.mulesoft.org/documentation/display/current/Tuning+Performance

How to handle long asynchronous requests with pyramid and celery?

I'm setting up a web service with pyramid. A typical request for a view will be very long, about 15 min to finish. So my idea was to queue jobs with celery and a rabbitmq broker.
I would like to know what would be the best way to ensure that bad things cannot happen.
Specifically I would like to prevent the task queue from overflow for example.
A first mesure will be defining quotas per IP, to limit the number of requests a given IP can submit per hour.
However I cannot predict the number of involved IPs, so this cannot solve everything.
I have read that it's not possible to limit the queue size with celery/rabbitmq. I was thinking of retrieving the queue size before pushing a new item into it but I'm not sure if it's a good idea.
I'm not used to good practices in messaging/job scheduling. Is there a recommended way to handle this kind of problems ?
RabbitMQ has flow control built into the QoS. If RabbitMQ cannot handle the publishing rate it will adjust the TCP window size to slow down the publishers. In the event of too many messages being sent to the server it will also overflow to disk. This will allow your consumer to be a bit more naive although if you restart the connection on error and flood the connection you can cause problems.
I've always decided to spend more time making sure the publishers/consumers could work with multiple queue servers instead of trying to make them more intelligent about a single queue server. The benefit is that if you are really overloading a single server you can just add another one (or another pair if using RabbitMQ HA. There is a useful video from Pycon about Messaging at Scale using Celery and RabbitMQ that should be of use.

How can I tell a WAS service polling an MSMQ to wait when busy?

I'm working on a system which amongst other things, runs payroll, a heavy load process. It is likely that soon, there may be so many requests to run payroll at peak times that the batch servers will be overwhelmed.
I'm looking to put together a proof of concept to cope with this by using MSMQ (probably replacing this with a commercial solution like nservicebus later). I using this this example as a basis. I can see how to set up the bindings and stick it together, but I still need a way to tell the subscribers hosted by WAS to only process the 'run heavy payroll process' message if they are not busy. Otherwise the messages on the queue will get picked up straightaway and we have the same problem as before.
Can I set up the subscribing service to say, "I'm busy, I can't take the message, leave it on the queue"? Does the queue need to be transactional?
If you're using WCF then there's no way to conditionally activate the channel thereby leaving the messages on the queue for later.
A better solution is to host the message receiver in a completely different process, for example as a windows service. These can then be enabled/disabled according to your service window requirement.
You also get the additional benefit of being able to very easily scale out the message receivers to handle greater loads (by hosting more instances of your receiver).
One way to do this is to have 2 queues, your polling always checks the high priority queue first, only if there are no items in that queue does it take an item from the other

Does the redis pub/sub model require persistent connections to redis?

In a web application, if I need to write an event to a queue, I would make a connection to redis to write the event.
Now if I want another backend process (say a daemon or cron job) to process the or react the the publishing of the event in redis, do I need a persistant connection?
Little confused on how this pub/sub process works in a web application.
Basically in Redis there are two different messaging models:
Fire and Forget / One to Many: Pub/Sub. At the time a message is PUBLISH-ed all the subscribers will receive it, but this message is then lost forever. If a client was not subscribed there is no way it can get it back.
Persisting Queues / One to One: Lists, possibly used with blocking commands such as BLPOP. With lists you have a producer pushing into a list, and one or many consumers waiting for elements, but one message will reach only one of the waiting clients. With lists you have persistence, and messages will wait for a client to pop them instead of disappearing. So even if no one is listening there is a backlog (as big as your available memory, or you can limit the backlog using LTRIM).
I hope this is clear. I suggest you studying the following commands to understand more about Redis and messaging semantics:
LPUSH/RPUSH, RPOP/LPOP, BRPOP/BLPOP
PUBLISH, SUBSCRIBE, PSUBSCRIBE
Doc for this commands is available at redis.io
I'm not totally sure, but I believe that yes, pub/sub requires a persistent connection.
For an alternative I would take a peek at resque and how it handles that. Instead of using pub/sub it simply adds an item to a list in redis, and then whatever daemon or cron job you have can use the lpop command to get the first one.
Sorry for only giving a pseudo answer and then a plug.