RabbitMQ - purge a queue from all of its unacked messages - rabbitmq

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.

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

Moving single message in RabbitMq

I have got several messages on error queue which has name TestQueue_errors.
One of the messages on error queue is important and should be moved back to service queue TestQueue so it can be processed again. The other messages on error queue are broken and should stay on error queue.
I have tried to do that with shovel plugin but it seems it is able only to move all messages from one queue to another. Is there a way I could achieve that, to move single message from one queue to another?
As far as I know Rabbit Management does not allow to do it. The only thing you can do is to publish this message again.
Maybe there are some tools which give possibility to achieve it but it is not a standard behaviour.
Here are actions which you are able to perform on the queue (from RabbitMQ Management page):
Move all messages from one queue to another
Get all messages without requeue option (they would not be in the queue anymore)
Get first N messages without requeue option and then move the rest of messages to another queue

Move message From one Queue to other Queue without deleting it Rabbitmq

I have the following problem.
My program sends messages directly to the Queue (without exchange). I need to monitor incoming of new messages and send them to other Queue without removing them from source queue.
I don't have access to program code, so I'm not able to publish messages to exchange first.
Is it possible to solve this problem using the management web interface of RabbitMQ?
I tried to use shovel plugin, but it removes all messages from source queue after ack.
First to clear up few things:
My program sends messages directly to the Queue (without exchange) This is not true, at the very least (and most likely in this case) nameless exchange is used.
removes all messages from source queue after ack
this is by design and therefore perfectly fine.
You should never keep messages in the queue, queue is made to be consumed. As Derick Bailey says here
RabbitMQ is not a database. RabbitMQ is a message broker and queueing system.
on the same link you will find your answer. I cannot give a concrete one since you didn't provide motivation, but whatever it is keeping messages in the queue is never good!
Maybe you want to log/store your message first and then process it with the consequence of processing being some 3rd action or whatever...

Instruct RabbitMQ to resend undelivered messages periodically

Background
We're using langohr to interact with RabbitMQ. We've tried two different approaches to let RabbitMQ resend messages that has not yet been properly handled by our service. One way that works is to send a basic.nack with requeue set to the true but this will resend the message immediately until the service responds with a basic.ack. This is a bit problematic if the service for example tries to persist the message to a datastore that is currently down (and is down for a while). It would be better for us to just fetch the undelivered messages say every 20 seconds or so (i.e. we neither do a basic.ack or basic.nack if the datastore is down, we just let the messages be retained in the queue). We've tried to implement this using an ExecutorService whose gist is implemented like this:
(let [chan (lch/open conn)] ; We create a new channel since channels in Langohr are not thread-safe
(log/info "Triggering \"recover\" for channel" chan)
(try
(lb/recover chan)
(catch Exception e (log/error "Failed to call recover" e))
(finally (lch/close chan))))
Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work (the messages are not redelivered and just remains in the queue). If we restart the service the queued messages are consumed correctly. However we have other services that are implemented using spring-rabbitmq (in Java) and they seem to be taking care of this out of the box. I've tried looking in the source code to figure out how they do it but I haven't managed to do so yet.
Question
How do you instruct RabbitMQ to (re-)deliver messages in the queue periodically (preferably using Langohr)?
I am not sure what you are doing with your Spring AMQP apps, but there's nothing built into RabbitMQ for this.
However, it's pretty easy to set up dead-lettering using a TTL to requeue back to the original queue after some period of time. See this answer for examples, links etc.
EDIT
However, Spring AMQP does have a retry interceptor which can be configured to suspend the consumer thread for some period(s) during retry.
Stateful retry rejects and requeues; stateless retry handles the retries internally and has no interaction with the broker during retries.
See this answer which has instructions: we Nack the message, the nack puts the message into a holding queue for N seconds, then it TTLs out of that queue and into another queue that puts it back in the original queue.
It took a little bit of work to setup, but it works great!

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.