Can someone tell me whether MSMQ (using transactions) supports competing consumers? Basically, I have multiple threads dequeueing messages off of a single queue. Just wanted to make sure this will work since MSMQ sometimes behaves differently than I expect.
If you are calling Receive from multiple processes on the same machine on the same queue, you will not get the same message more than once -- unless you rollback a transaction from a read.
If you are using 2008/w7 and are receiving on multiple machines from the same remote queue within a transaction, you should not see the same message twice (again, unless you roll back).
If you are using an enumerator to peek the messages and then remove an interesting one (via RemoveCurrent), you should expect to see an exception that the message has already been removed if another consumer has picked it up.
If you are on 2003/XP, you cannot do remote receives in a transaction so all bets are off there.
Related
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.
I have a transactional private message queue (among other message queues on which I have not seen this problem) on a Windows Server 2008 R2 server.
This particular queue has a recurring problem happening every few weeks where the console shows a nonzero count of messages in the queue, but it does not have any messages in the queue itself or any subqueue. Queue Explorer shows the same thing. Performance counters indicate there are messages like the count in the built-in msmq console and queue explorer.
I cannot find any messages. I understand that I could see a situation like this for outgoing queues with dead letter tracking such that it may have been delivered to a remote machine but not yet processed. This is not an outgoing queue, though. Messages are sourced from remote machines and have landed here on this machine.
Also, I am certain that the count I'm seeing are not journal messages or subqueues.
Does this make any sense? Is there a logical explanation for this and under some circumstance this is expected? If so, what is it?
EDIT: Removed info about purging queue removing the count - that was incorrect. Purging actually does nothing and leaves me in the same state as before with a count reflected, but no messages showing.
As you noted, you can see a message count on an outgoing queue if source journaling is in use. The invisible messages are there in case they need to be moved to the DLQ.I would expect your problem to be similar - there should be a visible message in the outgoing queue and an invisible message in the destination queue because delivery hasn't completed. I assume a handshaking or storage acknowledgement has been lost along the way. Or maybe the message has been processed and removed from the queue but MSMQ couldn't update the sender of the fact. Check the outgoing queues on the remote machines sending TO this queue.
I'm using node-amqp. For each queue, there is one sender and one consumer. On the sender side, I need to maintain a list of active consumers. The question is when a consumer computer crashed, how would I get a notification and delete it from the list at the sender side?
I think you may not be using the MQ concept correctly. The whole point is to disconnect the consumers from the producers. On the whole it is not the job of the producers to know anything about the consumers, except the type of message they will be consuming. To the point that the producer will keep producing if a consumer crashes and the messages will continue to build up in the queue it was reading from.
There is a way to do it by using RabbitMQ's HTTP API (at http://server-name:55672/api/) to get list of connections, but it is too brutal for frequently queries. Another way in theory is to use alternate exchanges to detect undelivered messages, but I didn't tried this way yet.
Also, it may be possible to detect unexpected consumer disconnection by using dead-letter-exchanges as described there: http://www.rabbitmq.com/dlx.html
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.
What all functionality are there in queue which can't be achieved by topic??
The main requirement that I run into is that consumers cannot compete for a single message on a topic. For example, I have a client who publishes call center events. Several systems subscribe to these events. One of these systems is the actual call routing application which has multiple instances running. If each instance subscribes then the call is routed to all of them. However, if the message is dropped onto a queue and all the instances consume off the same queue then only one will receive the message and the call goes to that operator. If the publishing application converts from topics to a queue, the call center works but all the other subscriber apps don't get the message.
The solution (as implemented in WebSphere MQ) was to create an administrative subscription on the topic and deliver the messages to a queue that all application instances consume from. So the producer apps are still publishers, all the dynamic subscribers still get copies of the message and the call center app instances compete for a single instance of each published message.
Also, you can't use browse semantics on a topic whereas you can on a queue. With topics you can specify selectors to filter the messages that are returned but that's about it. With queues you can browse, reset the browse pointer and then browse some more.
If you put a message on a queue and nothing is there to receive it, the message remains queued up. If you put a message to a topic and there are no active subscribers or durable subscriptions, the message is discarded. Therefore messages in a queue are naturally durable whereas messages on a topic may or may not be.
From a pure JMS perspective, queue and topic are both instances of destination and are interchangeable if you don't try to browse. An application may not know whether the destination it opens is a queue or a topic unless it uses instanceOf() at run-time to find out.