Does Activemq ensure persistence? - queue

I am using activemq queues in my project. Does it guarantee that messages will remain in the queue until dispatched even in the event of failures?

if enabled to do so, yes...it will persist messages in a message store (file, database, etc) and only remove them after they have been successfully dequeued
see this page for details on persistence options: http://activemq.apache.org/persistence.html
see this page for exception handling options: http://activemq.apache.org/message-redelivery-and-dlq-handling.html

In addition to the broker persistence configuration, you need to insure the message producer delivery mode is persistent - see this.
On the consumer side the acknowledgement mode of the session will indicate when the message is acknowledged. Usually the default behavior of the JMS client is AUTO - the message is acknowledged when the receive method returns. But watch out, some wrapper like Spring might send the ACK before! In this case you may want to use Client acknowledgement or transactions...

Related

With ActiveMQ Artemis is it possible to find out if a listener has stopped listening to a topic?

I'm using ActiveMQ Artemis 2.18.0 and some Spring Boot clients that communicate with each other via topics. The Spring Boot clients use JMS for all MQTT operations.
I'd like to know if it is possible for a producer with one or more subscribers to find out whether a certain subscriber is actively listening or not. For example, there are 3 clients - SB1, SB2, and SB3. SB1 publishes to test/topic, and SB2 and SB3 are subscribed to test/topic. If SB2 shuts down for any reason would it be possible for SB1 to become aware of this?
I understand that queues would be the way to go for this, but my project is much better suited to the use of topics, and it is set up this way already and works fine. There's just one operation where it must be determined whether the listener is active or not in order to update the listener's online status, a crucial parameter. Right now, clients and the server continually poll a database so that the online status is periodically updated, I want to avoid doing this and use something that Artemis may provide instead.
Apache ActiveMQ Artemis emits notifications to inform listeners of potentially interesting events as consumer created or closed, see Management Notifications at http://activemq.apache.org/components/artemis/documentation/latest/management.html.
A listener of the management notification address would receive a message for each consumer created or closed, see the Management Notification Example at http://activemq.apache.org/components/artemis/documentation/latest/examples.html#management-notification
Part of the point to pub/sub based messaging is to decouple the information producer (publisher) from the consumer (subscriber). As a rule a published REALLY shouldn't care if there even are any subscribers.
If you want to know the status of the subscriber then it's up to the subscriber to update this, not the publisher. Things like the Last Will & Testament feature allow the subscriber to update it's status in the event of a failure to explicitly do it when going offline.

How to handle application failure after reading event from source in Spring Cloud Stream with rabbit MQ

I am using Spring Cloud Stream over RabbitMQ for my project. I have a processor that reads from a source, process the message and publish it to the sink.
Is my understanding correct that if my application picks up an event from the stream and fails (e.g. app sudden death):
unless I ack the message or
I save the message after reading it from the queue
then my event would be lost? What other option would I have to make sure not to lose the event in such case?
DIgging through the Rabbit-MQ documentation I found this very useful example page for the different types of queues and message deliveries for RabbitMQ, and most of them can be used with AMPQ.
In particular looking at the work queue example for java, I found exactly the answer that I was looking for:
Message acknowledgment
Doing a task can take a few seconds. You may wonder what happens if
one of the consumers starts a long task and dies with it only partly
done. With our current code, once RabbitMQ delivers a message to the
consumer it immediately marks it for deletion. In this case, if you
kill a worker we will lose the message it was just processing. We'll
also lose all the messages that were dispatched to this particular
worker but were not yet handled. But we don't want to lose any tasks.
If a worker dies, we'd like the task to be delivered to another
worker.
In order to make sure a message is never lost, RabbitMQ supports
message acknowledgments. An ack(nowledgement) is sent back by the
consumer to tell RabbitMQ that a particular message has been received,
processed and that RabbitMQ is free to delete it.
If a consumer dies (its channel is closed, connection is closed, or
TCP connection is lost) without sending an ack, RabbitMQ will
understand that a message wasn't processed fully and will re-queue it.
If there are other consumers online at the same time, it will then
quickly redeliver it to another consumer. That way you can be sure
that no message is lost, even if the workers occasionally die.
There aren't any message timeouts; RabbitMQ will redeliver the message
when the consumer dies. It's fine even if processing a message takes a
very, very long time.
Manual message acknowledgments are turned on by default. In previous
examples we explicitly turned them off via the autoAck=true flag. It's
time to set this flag to false and send a proper acknowledgment from
the worker, once we're done with a task.
Thinking about it, using the ACK seems to be the logic thing to do. The reason why I didn't think about it before, is because I thought of a ACK just under the perspective of the publisher and not of the broker. The piece of documentation above was very useful to me.

Is RabbitMQ capable of "pushing" messages from a queue to a consumer?

With RabbitMQ, is there a way to "push" messages from a queue TO a consumer as opposed to having a consumer "poll and pull" messages FROM a queue?
This has been the cause of some debate on a current project i'm on. The argument from one side is that having consumers (i.e. a windows service) "poll" a queue until a new message arrives is somewhat inefficient and less desirable than the idea having the message "pushed" automatically from the queue to the subscriber(s)/consumer(s).
I can only seem to find information supporting the idea of consumers "polling and pulling" messages off of a queue (e.g. using a windows service to poll the queue for new messages). There isn't much information on the idea of "pushing" messages to a consumer/subscriber...
Having the server push messages to the client is one of the two ways to get messages to the client, and the preferred way for most applications. This is known as consuming messages via a subscription.
The client is connected. (The AMQP/RabbitMQ/most messaging systems model is that the client is always connected - except for network interruptions, of course.)
You use the client API to arrange that your channel consume messages by supplying a callback method. Then whenever a message is available the server sends it to the client over the channel and the client application gets it via an asynchronous callback (typically one thread per channel). You can set the "prefetch count" on the channel which controls the amount of pipelining your client can do over that channel. (For further parallelism an application can have multiple channels running over one connection, which is a common design that serves various purposes.)
The alternative is for the client to poll for messages one at a time, over the channel, via a get method.
You "push" messages from Producer to Exchange.
https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/tutorial-three-python.html
BTW this is fitting very well IoT scenarios. Devices produce messages and sends them to an exchange. Queue is handling persistence, FIFO and other features, as well as delivery of messages to subscribers.
And, by the way, you never "Poll" the queue. Instead, you always subscribe to publisher. Similar to observer pattern. Generally, I would say genius principle.
So it is similar to post box or post office, except it sends you a notification when message is available.
Quoting from the docs here:
AMQP brokers either deliver messages to consumers subscribed to
queues, or consumers fetch/pull messages from queues on demand.
And from here:
Storing messages in queues is useless unless applications can consume
them. In the AMQP 0-9-1 Model, there are two ways for applications to
do this:
Have messages delivered to them ("push API")
Fetch messages as needed ("pull API")
With the "push API", applications have to indicate interest in
consuming messages from a particular queue. When they do so, we say
that they register a consumer or, simply put, subscribe to a queue. It
is possible to have more than one consumer per queue or to register an
exclusive consumer (excludes all other consumers from the queue while
it is consuming).
Each consumer (subscription) has an identifier called a consumer tag.
It can be used to unsubscribe from messages. Consumer tags are just
strings.
RabbitMQ broker is like server that wont send data to consumer without consumer client getting registering itself to server. but then question comes like below
Can RabbitMQ keep client consumer details and connect to client when packet comes?
Answer is no. so what is alternative well then write plugin by yourself that maintain client information in some kind of config. Plugin will pull from RabbitMQ Queue and push to client.
Please give look at this plugin might help.
https://www.rabbitmq.com/shovel.html
Frankly speaking Client need to implement AMQP protocol to receive so and should listen connection on some port for that. This sound like another server.
Regards,
Vishal

Configuring activemq messages

In my project I am using acticemq.Now I need to configure my messages to be automatically deleted from the queue after certain time limit(say 24hrs).Can anybody say how and where to configure that.Can any one give me sample code to do so...Thanks
Use JMS Time To Live on the message to tell the broker how long the Message should remain on the Queue. You can configure what happens when a message is expired on the broker as well, it can be sent to a DLQ for instance.

Routing MSMQ messages from one queue to another

Is there some standard configuration setting, service, or tool that accepts messages from one queue and moves them on to another one? Automatically handling the dead message problem, and providing some of retry capability? I was thinking this is what "MSMQ Message Routing" does but can't seem to find documentation on it (except for on Windows Mobile 6, and I don't know if that's relevant).
Context:
I understand that when using MSMQ you should always write to a local queue so that failure is unlikely, and then X should move that message to a remote queue. Is my understanding wrong? Is this where messaging infrastructure like Biztalk comes in? Is it unnecessary to write to a local queue first to absolutely ensure success? Am I supposed to build X myself?
As Hugh points out, you need only one MSMQ Queue to Send messages in one direction from a source to a destination. Source and destination can be on the same server, same network or across the internet, however, both source and destination must have the MSMQ service running.
If you need to do 'message' routing (e.g. a switch which processes messages from several source or destination queues, or routing a message to one or more subscribers based on the type of message etc) you would need more than just MSMQ queue.
Although you certainly can use BizTalk to do message routing, this would be expensive / overkill if you didn't need to use other features of BizTalk. Would recommend you look at open source, or building something custom yourself.
But by "Routing" you might be referring to the queue redirection capability when using HTTP as the transport e.g. over the internet (e.g. here and here).
Re : Failed delivery and retry
I think you have most of the concepts - generally the message DELIVERY retry functionality should be implicit in MSMQ. If MSMQ cannot deliver the message before the defined expiry, then it will be returned on the Dead Letter Queue, and the source can then process messages from the DLQ and then 'compensate' for them (e.g. reverse the actions of the 'send', indicate failure to the user, etc).
However 'processing' type Retries in the destination will need to be performed by the destination application / listener (e.g. if the destination system is down, deadlocks, etc)
Common ways to do this include:
Using 2 Phase commit - under a distributed unit of work, pull the message off MSMQ and process it (e.g. insert data into a database, change the status of some records etc), and if any failure is encountered, then leave the message back onto the queue and the DB changes will be rolled back.
Application level retries - i.e. on the destination system, in the event of 'retryable' type errors (timeout due to load, deadlocks etc) then to sleep for a few seconds and then retry the same transaction.
However, in most cases, indefinite processing retries are not desirable and you would ultimately need to admit defeat and implement a mechanism to log the message and the error and remove it from the queue.
But I wouldn't 'retry' business failures (e.g. Business Rules, Validation etc) and the behaviour should be defined in your requirements of how to handle these (e.g. account is overdrawn, message is not in a correct format or not valid, etc), e.g. by returning a "NACK" type message back to the source.
HTH
MSMQ sends messages from one queue to another queue.
Let's say you have a queue on a remote machine. You want to send a message to that queue.
So you create a sender. A sender is an application that can use the MSMQ transport to send a message. This can be a .Net queue client (System.Messaging), a WCF service consumer (either over netMsmqBinding or msmqIntegrationBinding, BizTalk using the MSMQ adapter, etc etc.
When you send the message, what actually happens is:
The MSMQ queue manager on the sender machine writes the message to a temporary local queue.
The MSMQ queue manager on the sender machine connects to the MSMQ manager on the receiving machine and transmits the message.
The MSMQ queue manager on the receivers machine puts the message onto the destination queue.
In certain situations MSMQ will encounter messages which for some reason or another cannot be received on the destination queue. In these situations, if you have indicated that a message will use the dead-letter queue then MSMQ will make sure that the message is forwarded to the dead-letter queue.