Does a Mule manual shutdown allow the current flow to complete? - mule

I'm running a flow on mule-standalone-3.5.0 on Linux and trying to understand what happens in the case of a manual server shutdown.
Right now I see the currently running 'main' flow which is a recursive loop continuing during the shutdown, long enough to finish processing of the current message. I would like to know if that is part of 'graceful shutdown' or just good luck.
It does try to call itself again which I stop by checking the run state of a flow I know stops quickly.
def flow = muleContext.getRegistry().lookupFlowConstruct("initFlow")
if ((flow.isStopped() || flow.isStopping())) {
message.setInvocationProperty('runState', 'stopping')
}
else {
message.setInvocationProperty('runState', 'running')
}

Whenever Mule receives the shutdown signal, it makes sure to finish processing the current message to avoid loss of data and then starts closing down all endpoints and flows, together with thread pool cleanups. HTH.

Related

How to handle network time-out exception with rabbit mq while sending messages asynchronously using spring-amqp library

I have written a program which requires multiple queues interaction - means consumer of one queue writes message to another queue and same program has consumer to take action on that queue.
Problem: How to handle network time-out issues with queue while sending messages asynchronously using spring rabbit ampq library?or RabbitTemplate.send() function must throw an exception if there are network issues.
Currently, I have implemented RabbitTemplate.send() that returns immediately and working fine. But, If network is down, send function returns immediately, doesn't throw any exception and client code assumes success. As a result, i have in-consistent state in DB that message is successfully processed. Please note that call to send function is wrapped inside transactional block and goal is if queue writing fails, DB commit must also rollback. I am exploring following solutions but no success:
Can we configure rabbitTemplate to throw run-time exception if any network connectivity issue so that client call is notified? Please suggest how to do this.
Shall we use synchronous SendAndReceive function call but it leads to delay in processing? Another problem, observed with this function, my consumer code gets notification while sendAndReceive function is still blocked for writing message to queue. Please advise if we can delay notification to queue unless sendAndReceive function is returned. But call to SendAndReceive() was throwing an amqp exception if network was down which we were able to capture, but it has cost associated related to performance.
My application is multi-threaded, if multiple threads are sending message using sendAndReceive(), how spring-amqp library manages queue communication? Does it internally creates channel per request? If messages are delivered via same channel, it would impact performance a lot for multi-threaded application.
Can some-one share sample code for using SendAndReceive function with best-practices?
Do we have any function in spring-amqp library to check health of RabbitMQ server before submitting send function call? I explored rabbitTemplate.isRunning() but not getting proper result. If any specific configuration required, please suggest.
Any other solution to consider for guaranteed message delivery or handle network time-out issues to throw runtime exceptions to client..
As per Gary comment below, I have set: rabbitTemplate.setChannelTransacted(true); and it makes call sync. Next part of problem is that if I have transaction block on outer block, call to RabbitTemplate.send() returns immediately. I expect transaction block of outer function must wait for inner function to return, otherwise, ii don't get expected result as my DB changes are persisted though we enabled setChannelTransacted to true. I tried various Transaction propagation level but no success. Please advise if I am doing anything wrong and review transactional propagation settings as below
#Transactional
public void notifyQueueAndDB(DBRequest dbRequest) {
logger.info("Updating Request in DB");
dbService.updateRequest(dbRequest));
//Below is call to RabbitMQ library
mqService.sendmessage(dbRequest); //If sendMessage fails because of network outage, I want DB commit also to be rolled-back.
}
MQService defined in another library of project, snippet below.
#Transactional( propagation = Propagation.NESTED)
private void sendMessage(......) {
....
rabbitTemplate.send(this.queueExchange, queueName, amqpMessage);
}catch (Exception exception) {
throw exception
}
Enable transactions so that the send is synchronous.
or
Use Publisher confirms and wait for the confirmation to be received.
Either one will be quite a bit slower.

Messages being lost on consumer falling over

This seems like a pretty basic question, but I seem to be losing messages when the consumer falls over before acknowledging them. I have set up the broker with an exchange audit:exchange and a queue bound to it audti:queue. Both are durable, and as expected if I send messages when no consumer is active they sit on the queue and get processed by the consumer when it starts up. However if I put a break point in the consumer and kill the process half way through, the message is not requeued - it just seems to get lost. The consumer is set up using the annotation
#RabbitListener(queues="audit:queue")
public void process(Message message) {
routeMessage(message) //stop here and kill process - message removed from q
}
I can't reproduce your issue.
With the breakpoint triggered, I see the message still in the queue (unacked=1) on the rabbit console.
When the process is killed; the message goes back to ready.
Have you configured the listener container factory to use Acknowledgemode.NONE?
That will exhibit the behavior you describe.
The default is AUTO which means the message will only be acknowledged when the listener returns successfully.
If you still think there's an issue; please supply the complete test case.
Sorry this was my bad (I just wasted a few hours .. sigh). I was killing the app from within my ide. Which probably detaches and then kills the process - allowing time for it to proceed just enough that it actually does send the ack. When I just killed the process from a terminal it worked exactly as expected. Particualr apologies to you Gary for wasting your time as well.

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

Synchronizing dependent asychnronized functions Objective C

So I am running into a race condition and I have a few solutions on how to fix the issue. I am new to threading so obviously, my opinion and research is limited. I have a large amount of asynchronization calls that can happen if a user receives certain messages from server. Thus, my design is poor due to the dependent nature of my objects.
Lets say I have a function called
adduser:(NSString s){
does some asynchronize activity
}
Messageuser:(NSString s)
{
Does some more asychronize activity
}
if a user were to recieve a message telling it to addUser "Ryan". he would than create a thread and proceed with looking up Ryan and storing him. However, if the user has the application in suspended mode, and in the buffered of messages waiting to be recieved there is a addUser request and a MessageUser request, a race condition occures because it takes longer to complete Adduser than it does to complete MessageUser. Thus, If messageUser is called , and (in our example) "Ryan" has not been fully added, it throws an error.
What would be a possible solution to this issue. I looked into locks and semaphores, and what I am trying to do is, when MessageUser recieves a call, check to make sure there is no thread currently proccessing addUser. If there is none, proceed. Else wait, than proceed after it has finished.
Well it depends on how the messages are being issued in the first place and what the async response events are.
If the operations have dependencies (ordering requirements) then perhaps a background serial queue would be appropriate? That is a simple way to ensure the messages are processed in order.
If the async operations take completion blocks, then you could have the completion block issue the request for the next operation to be performed, though you may not know about that ahead of time.
If you need to solve this in a more general way then you need some kind of system for tracking prerequisites so you can skip work items that don't have their prerequisites met yet. That probably means your own background thread that monitors a list of waiting tasks and receives notification of all task completions so it can scan for items waiting on that completion and issue them.
It seems really complicated though... I suspect you don't really have such strong async parallel processing requirements and a much simpler design would be just as effective. Given your situation where you are receiving messages from a server, I think a serial queue would be the best option. Then you can process messages in the order the server sent them and keep things simple.
//do this once at app startup
dispatch_queue_t queue = dispatch_queue_create("com.example.myapp", NULL);
//handle server responses
dispatch_async(queue, ^{
//handle server message here, one at a time
});
In reality, depending on how you connect to your server you might be able to just move the entire connection handling to the background queue and communicate with it via messages from the UI, and update the UI by dispatching to the dispatch_get_main_queue() which will be the UI thread.

How to detect alarm-based blocking RabbitMQ producer?

I have a producer sending durable messages to a RabbitMQ exchange. If the RabbitMQ memory or disk exceeds the watermark threshold, RabbitMQ will block my producer. The documentation says that it stops reading from the socket, and also pauses heartbeats.
What I would like is a way to know in my producer code that I have been blocked. Currently, even with a heartbeat enabled, everything just pauses forever. I'd like to receive some sort of exception so that I know I've been blocked and I can warn the user and/or take some other action, but I can't find any way to do this. I am using both the Java and C# clients and would need this functionality in both. Any advice? Thanks.
Sorry to tell you but with RabbitMQ (at least with 2.8.6) this isn't possible :-(
had a similar problem, which centred around trying to establish a channel when the connection was blocked. The result was the same as what you're experiencing.
I did some investigation into the actual core of the RabbitMQ C# .Net Library and discovered the root cause of the problem is that it goes into an infinite blocking state.
You can see more details on the RabbitMQ mailing list here:
http://rabbitmq.1065348.n5.nabble.com/Net-Client-locks-trying-to-create-a-channel-on-a-blocked-connection-td21588.html
One suggestion (which we didn't implement) was to do the work inside of a thread and have some other component manage the timeout and kill the thread if it is exceeded. We just accepted the risk :-(
The Rabbitmq uses a blocking rpc call that listens for a reply indefinitely.
If you look the Java client api, what it does is:
AMQChannel.BlockingRpcContinuation k = new AMQChannel.SimpleBlockingRpcContinuation();
k.getReply(-1);
Now -1 passed in the argument blocks until a reply is received.
The good thing is you could pass in your timeout in order to make it return.
The bad thing is you will have to update the client jars.
If you are OK with doing that, you could pass in a timeout wherever a blocking call like above is made.
The code would look something like:
try {
return k.getReply(200);
} catch (TimeoutException e) {
throw new MyCustomRuntimeorTimeoutException("RabbitTimeout ex",e);
}
And in your code you could handle this exception and perform your logic in this event.
Some related classes that might require this fix would be:
com.rabbitmq.client.impl.AMQChannel
com.rabbitmq.client.impl.ChannelN
com.rabbitmq.client.impl.AMQConnection
FYI: I have tried this and it works.