Will the ActiveMQ REST interface support zipped XML messages when posting to topics? I'm not able to test this myself right now.
Generally speaking, ActiveMQ doesn't care about the content of the message. It's all just bytes. Assuming the message doesn't fail for some other indirectly related reason (e.g. it exceed the max frame size) then it should work.
I am using RabbitMQ with Spring AMQP
large message (>100MB, 102400KB)
small bandwidth (<512Kbps)
low heartbeat interval (10 seconds)
single broker
It will take >= 200*8 seconds to consume the message, which is more than my heartbeat interval. From https://stackoverflow.com/a/42363685/418439
If the message transfer time between nodes (60seconds?) > heartbeat time between nodes, it will cause the cluster to disconnect and the loose the message
Will I also face the disconnection issue even I am using single broker?
Does the heartbeat and consumer using the same thread, where if
consumer is consuming, it is not possible to perform heartbeat?
If so, what can I do to consume the message, without increase heartbeat interval or reduce my message size?
Update:
I have received another answer and comments after I posted my own answer. Thanks for the feedback. Just to clarify, I do not use AMQP for file transfer. Actually the data is in JSON message, some are simple and small but some contain complex information, include some free hand drawing. Besides saving the data at Data Center, we also save a copy of message at branch level via AMQP, for case connectivity to Data Center is not available.
So, the real questions here are a bit more fundamental, and those are: (1) is it appropriate to perform a large file transfer via AMQP, and (2) what purpose does the heartbeat serve?
Heartbeats
First off, let's address the heartbeat question. As the RabbitMQ documentation clearly states, the purpose of the heartbeat is "to ensure that the application layer promptly finds out about disrupted connections."
The reason for this is simple. In an ordinary AMQP usage, there may be several seconds, even minutes between the arrival of successive messages. Without data being exchanged across a TCP session, many firewalls and other networking equipment automatically close ports to lower exposure to the enterprise network. Heartbeats further help mitigate a fundamental weakness in TCP, which is the difficulty of detecting a dropped connection. Networks experience failure, and TCP is not always able to detect that on its own.
So, the bottom line here is that, while you're transferring a large message, the connection is active and the heartbeat function serves no useful purpose, and can cause you trouble. It's best to turn it off in such cases.
AMQP For Moving Large Files?
The second issue, and I believe more important question, is how should large files be dealt with. To answer this, let's first consider what a message queue does: sending messages -- small bits of data which communicate something to another computer system. The operative word here is small. Messages typically contain one of three things: 1. commands (go do something), 2. events (something happened), 3. requests (give me some data), and 4. responses (here is your data). A full discussion on these is beyond the scope, but suffice it to say that each of these can generally be composed of a small message less than 100kB.
Indeed, the AMQP protocol, which underlies RabbitMQ, is a fairly chatty protocol. It requires large messages be divided into multiple segments of no more than 131kB. This can add a significant amount of overhead to a large file transfer, especially when compared to other file transfer mechanisms (FTP, for instance). Secondly, the message has to be fully processed by the broker before it is made available in a queue, and it ties up valuable resources on the broker while this is being done. For one, the whole message must fit into RAM on the broker due to its architecture. This solution may work for one client and one broker, but it will break quickly when scaling out is attempted.
Finally, compression is often desirable when transferring files - HTTP supports gzip compression automatcially. AMQP does not. It is quite common in message-oriented applications to send a message containing a resource locator (e.g. URL) pointing to the larger data file, which is then accessed via appropriate means.
The moral of the story
As the adage goes: "to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." AMQP is not a hammer- it's a precision scalpel. It has a very specific purpose, and narrow applicability within that purpose. Using it for something other than its intended purpose will lead to stability and reliability problems in whatever it is you are designing, and overall dissatisfaction with your end product.
Will I also face the disconnection issue even I am using single
broker?
Yes
Does the heartbeat and consumer use the same thread, where
if consumer is consuming, it is not possible to perform heartbeat?
Can't confirm the thread, but from what I observe when Java RabbitMQ consumer consumes a message, it won't perform heartbeat acknowledgement. If the time to consume longer than 3 x heartbeat timeout timer (due to large message and/or low bandwidth), MQ server will close AMQP connection.
If so, what can I do to consume the message, without increase
heartbeat interval or reduce my message size?
I resolved my issue by increasing heartbeat size. No further code change is required.
I am implementing an application using spring websockets, stompjs and sockjs. The messages that I am currently sending are working fine when the message size is less than the configured buffer size limit, however its hard for me to judge what the size would be as it would depend on the user selection and the message is then built on it.
My question here is
1) Who handles the message size limit, is it the message broker, right now I am using the default message broker that comes with spring, does it help if I move to ActiveMQ and do I need to do something on ActiveMQ's configuration to change this message size?
2) I was looking into partial messaging in spring websockets, but I couldnt find any demonstration of it. Can you please let me know?
I'm using NServiceBus 4.x with RabbitMQ 3.2.x as my transport.
I made the assumption that by using RabbitMQ as my transport I would be given the competing consumer model as an option. I understand that NServiceBus employs the "Fannout" exchange type for all exchanges and does not support round robin at this time. However is there a way to configure NServiceBus to take advantage of the levels of indirection via Exchanges and channels that RabbitMQ offers.
I have several consumers I would like to compete for messages from a given queue. What I am observing is subscribers' blocking access to further message retrieval from the queue until the message is consumed. So having more then one consumer at this point does me no good other then redundancy.
After reading some documentation on RabbitMQ I'm assuming that it's normal to block until the Ack receipt is sent from the subscriber. But I had assumed that subscriber #2 would have free access to the queue to fetch another message.
There is mention of increasing the prefetch count on RabbitMQ channel.
Example:
channel.BasicQos(0,prefetchcount,false)
I don't see anywhere that I can change this setting via configuration in NServiceBus. Furthermore as I read what prefetch does I'm really not sure this what i'm looking for.
Is it possible to use RabbitMQ with out a distirbutor type pattern used with MSMQ? Or should I move to MassTransit or Rebus?
Put prefetchcount=2 in your connection string. Any value above 1 will tell the broker to allow more than X unacked message to go out. You need to fiddle with this setting to find the optimum for your scenario.
What are the allowed types of messages (strings, bytes, integers, etc.)?
What is the maximum size of a message?
What is the maximum number of queues and exchanges?
Theoretically anything can be stored/sent as a message. You actually don't want to store anything on the queues. The system works most efficiently if the queues are empty most of the time. You can send anything you want to the queue with two preconditions:
The thing you are sending can be converted to and from a bytestring
The consumer knows exactly what it is getting and how to convert it to the original object
Strings are pretty easy, they have a built in method for converting to and from bytes. If you know it is a string then you know how to convert it back. The best option is to use a markup string like XML, JSON, or YML. This way you can convert objects to Strings and back again to the original objects; they work across programming languages so your consumer can be written in a different language to your producer as long as it knows how to understand the object.
I work in Java. I want to send complex messages with sub objects in the fields. I use my own message object. The message object has two additional methods toBytes and fromBytes that convert to and from the bytestream. I use routing keys that leave no doubt as to what type of message the consumer is receiving. The message is Serializable. This works fine, but is limiting as I can only use it with other Java programs.
The size of the message is limited by the memory on the server, and if it is persistent then also the free HDD space too. You probably do not want to send messages that are too big; it might be better to send a reference to a file or DB.
You might also want to read up on their performance measures:
http://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2012/04/17/rabbitmq-performance-measurements-part-1/
http://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2012/04/25/rabbitmq-performance-measurements-part-2/
Queues are pretty light weight, you will most likely be limited by the number of connections you have. It will depend on the server most likely. Here is some info on a similiar question:
http://lists.rabbitmq.com/pipermail/rabbitmq-discuss/2009-February/003042.html
What is the maximum size of a message?
It used to be 2 GiB before version 3.8.0:
%% Trying to send a term across a cluster larger than 2^31 bytes will
%% cause the VM to exit with "Absurdly large distribution output data
%% buffer". So we limit the max message size to 2^31 - 10^6 bytes (1MB
%% to allow plenty of leeway for the #basic_message{} and #content{}
%% wrapping the message body).
-define(MAX_MSG_SIZE, 2147383648).
Reference: https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-common/blob/v3.7.21/include/rabbit.hrl#L279
It has been 512 MiB since version 3.8.0:
%% Max message size is hard limited to 512 MiB.
%% If user configures a greater rabbit.max_message_size,
%% this value is used instead.
-define(MAX_MSG_SIZE, 536870912).
Reference: https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-common/blob/v3.8.0/include/rabbit.hrl#L238
See robthewolf's answer.
The max message size is 2GB, however, performance tuning for messages of this size is not effective. Max Message Size
There is no hard limit imposed by RabbitMQ Server Software on the number of queues, however, the hardware the server is running on may very well impact this limit.
3a. There is no queue length limit imposed by the server by default. You can, however, limit this through server-side policy (configuration) or client side policy. Max Queue Length
There is more information and links on a related post.