How to specify another timeout queue for NSB? - nservicebus

I am using NSB 4.4.2
I want to have something like heartbeats on my saga to show processing statistics.
When i request a timeout it sends to sagas input queue.
In case of many messages prior to this timeout message, IHandleTimeouts may not be fired at specific time.
Is it a bug? Or how can i use separate queue for timeout messages?
Thanks

You are correct - when a timeout is ready to be dispatched, it is sent to the incoming queue of the endpoint, and if there are already many other messages in there, it will have to wait its turn to be processed.
Another thing you might want to consider, is that the endpoint may be down at that time.
If you want to guarantee that your saga code will be invoked at (or very close to) the time of the timeout, you'll need to set up a high availability deployment first. Then, you should look at setting the SLA required of that endpoint - how quickly messages should be processed, and then monitor the time to breach SLA performance counter.
See here for more information: http://docs.particular.net/nservicebus/monitoring-nservicebus-endpoints
You should be prepared to scale out your endpoint as needed to guarantee enough processing power to keep up with the load coming in.
NOTE: The reason we use the same incoming queue for processing these timeouts is by design. A timeout message is almost always the same priority or lower than the other business messages being processed by a saga. As such, it doesn't make sense to have them cut ahead of other messages in line.

Timeouts are sent to the [endpointname].timeouts

Related

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.

active mq delay recovery

I'm trying to use an ActiveMQ queue as a Apache Storm Spout.
I use the "INDIVIDUAL_ACK" strategy.
In my idea, I'm planning to trigger a session.recover() periodically, to resend messages that would not be acknowledged (error in the Bolt processing chain).
But if I do that, all the messages corresponding to Storm tuple, currently processed, would be resent. I would try to limit this phenomenon.
Ideally, I would like to parameter a delay, all the message sent younger that this delay should not be resent (this delay should also be in phase with the timeout of Storm tuple processing)
I've read about AMQ policies (http://activemq.apache.org/redelivery-policy.html) but I'm not sure that the redeliveryDelay param applies to my problem.
Any hint?
Franck
With INDIVIDUAL_ACKNOWLEDGE you don't use a session.recover(), you do a message.acknowledge(). Additionally, its best practice to only use JMS-style transactions for automatically recoverable errors (ie. host is down). For a contextual issue (ie.. bad data) that will never work, you should move the message to another queue.. i.e. some .DLQ or .ERR queue.

Setting a long timeout for RabbitMQ ack message

I was wondering if this is possible. I want to pull a task from a queue and have some work that could potentially take anywhere from 3 seconds or longer (possibly) minutes before an ack is sent back to RabbitMQ notifying that the work has been completed. The work is done by a user, hence this is why the time it takes to process the job varies.
I don't want to ack the message immediately after I pop off the queue because I want the message to be requeued if no ack is received. Can anyone give me any insights into how to solve my problem?
Having a long timeout should be fine, and certainly as you say you want redelivery if something goes wrong, so you want to only ack after you finish.
The best way to achieve that, IMO, would be to have multiple consumers on the queue (i.e. multiple threads/processes consuming from the same queue). That should be fine as long as there's no particular ordering constraint on your queue contents (i.e. the way there might be if the queue were to contain contents representing Postgres data that involves FK constraints).
This tutorial on the RabbitMQ website provides more info (Python linked, but there should be similar tutorials for other languages): https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/tutorial-two-python.html
Edit in response to comment from OP:
What's your heartbeat set to? If your worker doesn't acknowledge the heartbeat within the set period of time, the server will consider the connection to be dead.
Not sure which language you're using, but for Java you would use the setRequestedHeartbeat method to specify the heartbeat.
The way you implement your workers, it's vital that the heartbeat can still be sent back to the RabbitMQ server. If something blocks the client from sending the heartbeat, the server will kill the connection after the time interval expires.

MSMQ + WCF - Retry with Growing Delay

I am using MSMQ 4 with WCF. We have a Microsoft Dynamics plugin putting a message on an queue. A service picks up the message and makes an HTTP request to another web server. The web server responds by putting another message on a different queue. A second service picks up the messages and sends the response back to Dynamics...
We have our retry queue set up to retry 3 times and then wait for 5 minutes before retrying again. The Dynamics system some times takes so long (due to other plugins) that we can round-trip before the database transaction commits. The user's aren't seeing the update come through for another 5 minutes.
I am curious if there is a way to configure the retry mechanism to retry incrementally. So, the first time it fails, it only waits a few seconds. If it fails a second time, it waits twice that. And the time between retries just keeps growing.
The problem with just reducing the time between retries is that a bad message could easily fill up a log file.
It turns out there is no built-in way of doing this. One slightly involved option is to create multiple queues, each with its own retry/poison sub-queues, each with a growing retry delay. You can reuse the same handler for each queue - the only thing that changes is the configuration. You also need a handler that can read the poison sub-queues (service) and move the message to the next queue in the chain (client).
So, you set receiveErrorHandling to Move. The maxRetryCycles and receiveRetryCount are just 1. Each queue will use a growing retryCycleDelay. Each queue you create will have a poison sub-queue created for it automatically. You simply read from each poison sub-queue and use a client to move it to the next queue.
I am sure someone could write some code that would automatically create N queues with a growing retryCycleDelay and hook it up all programmatically. Since it is the same handler/client for every queue, it wouldn't be a big deal.

NServiceBus Retry Delay

What is the optimal way to configure/code NServiceBus to delay retrying messages?
In its default configuration retry happens almost immediately up to the number of attempts defined in the configuration file. I'd ideally like to retry again after an hour, etc.
Also, how does HandleCurrentMessageLater() work? What does the Later aspect refer to?
The NSB retries is there to remedy temporary problems like deadlocks etc. Longer retries is better handled by creating another process that monitors the error queue and puts them back into to the source queue at the interval you like. Take a look at the ReturnToSourceQueue.exe that comes with NSB for reference.
Edit: NServiceBus now supports this , we call it Second Level Retries, see http://docs.particular.net/ for more details
Here is a blog post on why NServiceBus doesn't include a retry delay that I wrote after asking Udi this very same question in his distributed systems architecture course:
NServiceBus Retries: Why no back-off delay?
And here is a discussion thread covering some of the points involved in building an error queue monitor/retry endpoint:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/nservicebus/message/10964
As far as HandleCurrentMessageLater(), all that does is puts the current message back at the end of the queue. If there are no other messages waiting, it's going to be processed again immediately.
As of NServiceBus 3.2.1, they provide an out of the box solution to handle back off delays in the event of consecutive message failures. The previously existing retry mechanism still retries failures without a delay to handle cases like Database deadlocks, quickly self healing network issues, etc.
Once a message has been retried the configured number of times, the message is moved to a "Second Level Retry" queue. This queue, as configured below, will retry after a 10, 20, and 30 second delay, then the message will be moved to the configured error queue. You're free to change these values to something that better suites your environment.
You can also check out this link:
http://docs.particular.net/nservicebus/second-level-retries