RabbitMQ overflow queue to disk - rabbitmq

I have RabbitMQ with limited amount of RAM. If publishers and consumers online, it's all ok, but when need do restart consumer, RabbitMQ fill the memory and block publishers. When publishers is blocked, it will fast eat RAM.
How to confiurate RabbitMQ to overflow queue to disk, is RAM is fully filled?

It might help to make use of the Time-To-Live Extensions. See http://www.rabbitmq.com/ttl.html#per-queue-message-ttl and set an expiration for messages.

Related

How to have more than 50 000 messages in a RabbitMQ Queue

We have currently using a service bus in Azure and for various reasons, we are switching to RabbitMQ.
Under heavy load, and when specific tasks on backend are having problem, one of our queues can have up to 1 million messages waiting to be processed.
RabbitMQ can have a maximum of 50 000 messages per queue.
The question is how can we design the rabbitMQ infrastructure to continue to work when messages are temporarily accumulating?
Note: we want to host our RabbitMQ server in a docker image inside a kubernetes cluster.
we imagine an exchange that would load balance mesages between queues in nodes behind.
But what is unclear to us is how to dynamically add new queues on demand if we detect that queues are getting full.
RabbitMQ can have a maximum of 50 000 messages per queue.
There is no this kind of limit.
RabbitMQ can handle more messages using quorum or classic queues with lazy.
With stream queues RabbitMQ can handle Millions of messages per second.
we imagine an exchange that would load balance messages between queues in nodes behind.
you can do that using different bindings.
kubernetes cluster.
I would suggest to use the k8s Operator
But what is unclear to us is how to dynamically add new queues on demand if we detect that queues are getting full.
There is no concept of FULL in RabbitMQ. There are limits that you can put using max-length or TTL.
A RabbitMQ queue will never be "full" (no such limitation exists in the software). A queue's maximum length rather depends on:
Queue settings (e.g max-length/max-length-bytes)
Message expiration settings such as x-message-ttl
Underlying hardware & cluster setup (available RAM and disk space).
Unless you are using Streams (new feature in v 3.9) you should always try to keep your queues short (if possible). The entire idea of a Message Queue (in it's classical sense) is that a message should be passed along as soon as possible.
Therefore, if you find yourself with long queues you should rather try to match the load of your producers by adding more consumers.

RabbitMQ HA with Durable features

Background
I have a RabbitMQ cluster that running for more than a year without any problems. Lastly, I found that sometimes, the CPU of the machine is touching the 100% CPU. I'm investigating ways to increase the throughput of the cluster to serve more customers.
The cluster architecture is that we have HA enabled (exactly 1 replica), and durable messages (for all the queues). As I understand it, the durable feature is the most expensive one in terms of performance. So, I trying to understand if it is needed for me.
Question
According to my experience, the cluster was running for more than a year without problems. So I assume that the chance for a problem is very low. Even after this, I want to create another layer of protection, just in case...
If I have two servers that holding the same data, but not storing it into the disk (durable OFF), is not safe enough for 99.99% of the cases? Those two servers are in different regions so the chance that both of them will go down is very low. Wondering if saving it to the disk can be helpful, or just a waste?
There is a thumb rule about the performance improvements of disabling the durable feature? In percents.
Thank you!
The influence of durable on performance
For reliable delivery, rabbitmq use the publish confirmation mechanism. Everytime the publisher publish a message to rabbitmq server, the server will respond with basic.ack rpc to ack the message. For routable messages, the basic.ack is sent when a message has been accepted by all the queues. For persistent messages routed to durable queues, this means persisting to disk. For mirrored queues, this means that all mirrors have accepted the message. So as you mentioned, the IO may become bottlenect of performance.
Is it overhead both durable and mirrored
It depends on your consideration between performance and HA. Imagine if you declare non-durable mirrored queue, and the master and slave are down, your messages will get lost. So whether overhead depends on how important message safty is.
Is the performance bottleneck mainly caused by durable?
As we discussed, if you declare non-durable queue, the throught maybe increase. But this may not be the main cause of low performance. You have said the cpu usage sometimes is 100%, which means very little I/O waitting. The high load maybe due to many connections and high throughput. In order to determine how to increase throughput, you can use benchmark tool to find the bottleneck.
pages maybe useful:
https://www.cloudamqp.com/blog/2016-01-25-identify-and-protect-against-high-cpu-and-memory-usage.html
https://www.cloudamqp.com/blog/2018-01-08-part2-rabbitmq-best-practice-for-high-performance.html

Flow control limitting message rate on single queue

I have a exchange and only one queue bind to it. When the message publishing rate goes over some cap the rabbitmq automatically throttles the incoming message rate.
On further investigation i found this happens due to the "Flow control" trottling mechanism built in rabbitmq. https://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2014/04/14/finding-bottlenecks-with-rabbitmq-3-3/
As per this document i have connection, channels in flow control and not the queue. which means there is a cpu-bound / disk-bound limit.
My messages are not persistent so i don't have disk limitation. On Searching, i found documents stating a queue is limited to single cpu. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/rabbitmq-users/wzHMV7F0ugU/zhW_9b8ACQAJ
What does it mean ? do the rabbitmq queue process uses only 1 cpu even multiple cores are available in the machine? what is the limitation of cpu with respect to queue flow control?
A queue is handled by one and one only CPU, which mean that you have to design your message flow through rabbit with multiple queue in order to remain scalable.
If you are on one queue only you will be limited to a maximum number of messages no matter if you have 1 or more cores
https://www.rabbitmq.com/queues.html#runtime-characteristics
If you have a specific need to build an architecture with only one logical queue, which is explicitely not recommended ; or if you have a queue with a really high trafic, you can check sharded queues here : Github Sharded queues Plugin
It's a pluggin (take with caution and test everything before going to production, especialy failure and replication) that split a logical queue name into multiple queues.
If you are running a benchmark on rabbitmq, remember to produce and consume on a number of queues superior to the amount of CPU cores present on the server.
Other tips about benchmark, try to produce only, consume only, and both at the same time, with different persistence settings (persistence, message size, lazy queues, ...) and ack settings.

RabbitMQ HighAvailability

I am new to RabbitMQ. I wanted to know how memory is used in case of HA.
For example, in Kafka the partition use a specific amount of memory if data is present or not in it and so do the replications .In RabbitMQ how are the queues allocated memory ? and How does HA work ?Do the mirrored queues occupy the same amout of memory each replicated node ?
Queues in RabbitMQ don't need a lot of resources per se, but messages will be kept in memory in most of the cases. When a message is sent to the queue that has mirrored queues, this message will be replicated among other nodes defined by the mirroring policy. The idea of mirrored queues is to provide high availability, so if the broker hosting the master queue crashes, a new master queue will be elected among alive mirrored queues. The switch to the new node should happen quite fast, because all messages are ready to be consumed.
Simple example:
The cluster consists of 3 nodes:
The test queue was created on the node-1.rabbitmq node and the mirroring policy was applied to replicate messages on all nodes:
Approximately 70k messages were sent to the test queue and the screenshot from the RabbitMQ management tool is shown below:
It is clear that all nodes got messages and they are kept in memory.
Memory consumption of RabbitMQ is a tricky topic and there are many factors which can affect it (type of the queue, the amount of messages in other queues, reaching the defined limits, etc.). In the official documentation it is stated:
RabbitMQ can report on its own memory use, to let you see where your system is using memory. Note that all measurements are somewhat approximate, based on values returned by the underlying Erlang virtual machine; however they should still be accurate enough to be useful.

how to recover from message store exhaustion?

when a activemq broker gets flooded with messages or the consumer fails it will stop accepting messages once certain (configurable) limits are reached. In Broker Networks this effect can take down the whole cluster.
I'm currently using the default configuration for memory limits and experience the following behavior:
consumer fails or becomes very slow (known problem)
broker A (the one the consumer connects to) gets filled and stops accepting messages
all other brokers get filled up and stop to accept messages
the cluster is basicly down
if the consumer comes back online now it will try to reconnect to one of the cluster nodes but the nodes will not accept the connection becaus this would create advisory messages that can't be handled because the broker is already full.
How do i have to configure the memory limits so that my productive destinations are limited and blocked but the broker will still be able to accept advisories so my consumer can revover?
You should be able to use producerFlowControl to slow producers to not overwhelm your broker. That being said, this is enabled by default, so you are likely using it already...
I would try something like this (assuming an 8GB box or so)...
use the failover transport everywhere (broker/client connections)
increase JVM heap to 4 GB
increase systemUsage limits substantially (memoryUsage 3gb, storeUsage/tempUsage = 10 gb)
enable producer flow control on both topics and queues
set the memory limit to 2GB divided by the total # of topics+queues
in other words, this should in total be substantially less the the memoryUsage limit
exclude the Advisory topics from the producer flow control (they might be already)
This should limit the producers and leave resources for your system to function/recover/accept consumer connections...