I'm in a phase of learning RabbitMQ/AMQP from the RabbitMQ documentation. Something that is not clear to me that I wanted to ask those who have hands-on experience.
I want to have multiple consumers listening to the same queue in order to balance the work load. What I need is pretty much close to the "Work Queues" example in the RabbitMQ tutorial.
I want the consumer to acknowledge message explicitly after it finishes handling it to preserve the message and delegate it to another consumer in case of crash. Handling a message may take a while.
My question is whether AMQP postpones next message processing until the previous message is ack'ed? If so how do I achieve load balancing between multiple workers and guarantee no messages get lost?
No, the other consumers don't get blocked. Other messages will get delivered even if they have unacknowledged but delivered predecessors. If a channel closes while holding unacknowledged messages, those messages get returned to the queue.
See RabbitMQ Broker Semantics
Messages can be returned to the queue using AMQP methods that feature a requeue parameter (basic.recover, basic.reject and basic.nack), or due to a channel closing while holding unacknowledged messages.
EDIT In response to your comment:
Time to dive a little deeper into the AMQP specification then perhaps:
3.1.4 Message Queues
A message queue is a named FIFO buffer that holds message on behalf of a set of consumer applications.
Applications can freely create, share, use, and destroy message queues, within the limits of their authority.
Note that in the presence of multiple readers from a queue, or client transactions, or use of priority fields,
or use of message selectors, or implementation-specific delivery optimisations the queue MAY NOT
exhibit true FIFO characteristics. The only way to guarantee FIFO is to have just one consumer connected
to a queue. The queue may be described as “weak-FIFO” in these cases. [...]
3.1.8 Acknowledgements
An acknowledgement is a formal signal from the client application to a message queue that it has
successfully processed a message.[...]
So acknowledgement confirms processing, not receipt. The broker will hold on to the message until it's gotten acknowleged, so that it can redeliver them. But it is free to deliver more messages to consumers even if the prededing messages have not yet been acknowledged. The consumers will not be blocked.
Related
I'm having a little trouble figuring if Rabbit MQ can publish a message to a single queue with multiple subscribers, where the message will not get deleted until all subscribers to that queue have gotten the message.
The closest I can find is https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/amqp-concepts.html, where it states:
AMQP 0-9-1 has a built-in feature called message acknowledgements (sometimes referred to as acks) that consumers use to confirm message delivery and/or processing. If an application crashes (the AMQP broker notices this when the connection is closed), if an acknowledgement for a message was expected but not received by the AMQP broker, the message is re-queued (and possibly immediately delivered to another consumer, if any exists).
Does this mean if the queue has more than one subscriber, it will wait until the message is consumed by all subscribers?
You should use multiple queues bound to the same exchange, using the same binding. Then, when a message matches the binding, it will be delivered to all queues, which presumably each have a consumer.
If you have multiple consumers on a single queue, RabbitMQ will round-robin deliveries among those consumers (which is not what you want).
NOTE: the RabbitMQ team monitors the rabbitmq-users mailing list and only sometimes answers questions on StackOverflow.
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
Let's suppose we have one producer, one queue and some consumers which are subscribed on queue.
Producer -> Queue -> Consumers
Queues contains messages about life events. These messages should receive all consumers.
When queue will be erased?
When all consumers get message?
Or when one of consumers confirm message with flag ack (true)?
And how to manage priority, who from consumers must to get message first/last (don't confuse with message priority).
As instance I have 10 consumers and I want that the fifth consumer get message first, remaining consumers later after specified time.
Be careful: when there are many consumers on one queue, only one of them will receive a given message, provided that it is consumed and acked properly. You need to bind as many queues as consumers to an exchange to have all consumers receive the message.
For your priority question, there is no built-in mecanism to have consumers receive the same message with a notion of priority: consumer priority exists (see https://www.rabbitmq.com/consumer-priority.html), but it is made to have consumer receive a given message before the others on a given queue, so the other consumers won't receive this message. It you need to orchestrate the delivery of your messages, you have to think of a more complex system (maybe a saga or a resequencer?).
Note that you can delay messages using this pattern. Again, this requires having multiple queues.
Finally, there are many scenarios when a queue is deleted. Take a look at the documentation, these are well explained.
Is there any way in RabbitMQ to have multiple consumers get the same message from the same queue?
I need to send the same message to anyone who's listening but also ensure that someone deals with it. Basically, I need the fanout functionality of an exchange combined with the basic.ack functionality of a queue. Is there any way to accomplish this in a scalable way?
If you are trying to ensure that the message is properly processed, acknowledgement already provides this capability. If your consumer is unable to process the message and does not provide an ack it will be requeued and processed again by the next available consumer. Implementing multiple competing consumers on the same queue will give you round-robin delivery, allowing the other consumers a chance for success.
How scalable this will be depends on how long it takes to process each message compared to the incoming rate, queue durability, prefetch and how many competing consumers you have on the queue.
Does anyone know if the pop operation on a RabbitMQ queue is atomic?
I have several processes reading from the same queue (the queue is marked as durable, running on version 2.0.0) and I am seeing some quite odd behaviour.
If your multiple processes are consuming messages from the same queue then they should never consume the same message.
Here are the caveats, though:
If a message has been delivered by the broker to one of your consumers and it rejects the message (or terminates before getting a chance to acknowledge it) then the broker will put it back on the same queue and it would be delivered to one of your remaining active consumers.
If your consumers are pulling from distinct queues -- each with a matching binding -- then the broker will put copies of the message on each queue and each consumer will get a copy of the same message.