Broadcast message in rabbitmq and wait for all replies - rabbitmq

I'm using a fan out with a reply to address in a header. The tricky part is that I want to wait for the replies of all workers but I don't know how many I will recieve (I don't know how many workers exist when I send the broadcast).
Is there a way to know how many workers are currently connected?
Thanks in advance!

Brief answer: no, there isn't.
A general solution is to let the workers send sort of "work in progress" heartbeat messages (not RabbitMQ heartbeats, that go only to the broker, I mean at application level) to the reply-to exchange.
So you let the workers send their first heartbeat as soon as they get the message and start working. Then once every X seconds, until they haven't completed their task.
You never have the guarantee to know how many they are. For example it's possible that a worker have been reached by the first message, have started working but the replies can't reach the broker. Or a working worker fails and never report the result back (but monitoring the heartbeats the consumer(s) of the replies can be aware of it).
IMHO, it's a good practice to let a monitor application (your collector/reducer task) be aware of the state of the work, especially when it's a long-lasting one, instead of just "waiting and hoping".

Related

How to get/know a message that is processing in RabbitMQ?

I need to know if it's possible to know or get a message from RabbitMQ (consumers) which is processing (maybe if it's taking long time). But, I don't want to stop the service. I hope my question is clear enough.
I guess you mean if RabbitMQ provides any build-in notification or tracking about whether a specific message is being processed or not. The answer is No. But you should easily be able to implement one by your own. For instance, when begin to process a message in the consumer, the consumer could send a notification message to a notification queue.

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.

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.

RabbitMQ Message Lifetime Replay Message

We are currently evaluating RabbitMQ. Trying to determine how best to implement some of our processes as Messaging apps instead of traditional DB store and grab. Here is the scenario. We have a department of users who perform similar tasks. As they submit work to the server applications we would like the server app to send messages back into a notification window saying what was done - to all the users, not just the one submitting the work. This is all easy to do.
The question is we would like these message to live for say 4 hours in the Queue. If a new user logs in or say a supervisor they would get all the messages from the last 4 hours delivered to their notification window. This gives them a quick way to review what has recently happened and what is going on without having to ask others, "have you talked to John?", "Did you email him is itinerary?", etc.
So, how do we publish messages that have a lifetime of x hours from the time they were published AND any new consumers that connect will get all of these messages delivered in chronological order? And preferably the messages just disappear after they have expired from the queue.
Thanks
There is Per-Queue Message TTL and Per-Message TTL in RabbitMQ. If I am right you can utilize them for your task.
In addition to the above answer, it would be better to have the application/client publish messages to two queues. Consumer would consume from one of the queues while the other queue can be configured using per queue-message TTL or per message TTL to retain the messages.
Queuing messages you do to get a message from one point to the other reliable. So the sender can work independently from the receiver. What you propose is working with a temporary persistent store.
A sql database would fit perfectly, but also a mongodb would work nicely. You drop a document in mongo, give it a ttl and let the database handle the expiration.
http://docs.mongodb.org/master/tutorial/expire-data/

RabbitMQ management

In the console pane rabbitmq one day I had accumulated 8000 posts, but I am embarrassed that their status is idle at the counter ready and total equal to 1. What status should be completed at the job, idle? In what format is registered x-pires? It seems to me that I had something wrong =(
While it's difficult to fully understand what you are asking, it seems that you simply don't have anything pulling messages off of the queue in question.
In general, RabbitMQ will hold on to a message in a queue until a listener pulls it off and successfully ACKs, indicating that the message was successfully processed. You can configure queues to behave differently by setting a Time-To-Live (TTL) on messages or having different queue durabilities (eg. destroyed when there are no more listeners), but the default is to play it safe.