querying artemis queue size fails - spring-boot

Question

In a spring boot application using artemis we try to avoid queues containing too many messages. The intention is to only put in new messages if the number of messages currently in the queue falls below a certain limit, e.g. 100 messages. However, that seems not to work but we don't know why or what the "correct" method would be to implement that functionality. The number of messages as extracted by the code below is always 0 although in the gui there are messages.
To reproduce the problem I installed apache-artemis-2.13.0 locally.
We are doing something like the following
if (!jmsUtil.queueHasNotMoreElementsThan(QUEUE_ALMOST_EMPTY_MAX_AMOUNT, reprocessingMessagingProvider.getJmsTemplate())) {
log.info("Queue has too many messages. Will not send more...");
return;
}
jmsUtil is implemented like
public boolean queueHasNotMoreElementsThan(int max, JmsOperations jmsTemplate) {
return Boolean.TRUE.equals(
jmsTemplate.browse((session, queueBrowser) -> {
Enumeration enumeration = queueBrowser.getEnumeration();
return notMoreElemsThan(enumeration, max);
}));
}
private Boolean notMoreElemsThan(Enumeration enumeration, int max) {
for (int i = 0; i <= max; i++) {
if (!enumeration.hasMoreElements()) {
return true;
}
enumeration.nextElement();
}
return false;
}
As a check I used additionally the following method to give me the number of messages in the queue directly.
public int countPendingMessages(String destination, JmsOperations jmsTemplate) {
Integer totalPendingMessages = jmsTemplate.browse(destination,
(session, browser) -> Collections.list(browser.getEnumeration()).size());
int messageCount = totalPendingMessages == null ? 0 : totalPendingMessages;
log.info("Queue {} message count: {}", destination, messageCount);
return messageCount;
}
That method of extracting the queue size seems to be used as well by others and is based on the documentation of QueueBrowser: The getEnumeration method returns a java.util.Enumeration that is used to scan the queue's messages.
Would the above be the correct way on how to obtain the queue size? If so, what could be the cause of the problem? If not, how should the queue size be queried? Does spring offer any other possibility of accessing the queue?
Update: I read another post and the documentation but I wouldn't know on how to obtain the ClientSession.

Answer 1

There are some caveats to using a QueueBrowser to count the number of messages in the queue. The first is noted in the QueueBrowser JavaDoc:
Messages may be arriving and expiring while the scan is done. The JMS API does not require the content of an enumeration to be a static snapshot of queue content. Whether these changes are visible or not depends on the JMS provider.
So already the count may not be 100% accurate.
Then there is the fact that there may be messages still technically in the queue which have been dispatched to a consumer but have not yet been acknowledged. These messages will not be counted by the QueueBrowser even though they may be cancelled back to the queue at any point if the related consumer closes its connection.
Simply put the JMS API doesn't provide a truly reliable way to determine the number of messages in a queue. Furthermore, "Spring JMS" is tied to the JMS API. It doesn't have any other way to interact with a JMS broker. Given that, you'll need to use a provider-specific mechanism to determine the message count.
ActiveMQ Artemis has a rich management API that is accessible though, among other things, specially constructed JMS messages. You can see this in action in the "Management" example that ships with ActiveMQ Artemis in the examples/features/standard/management directory. It demonstrates how to use JMS resources and provider-specific helper classes to get the message count for a JMS queue. This is essentially the same solution as given in the other post you mentioned, but it uses the JMS API rather than the ActiveMQ Artemis "core" API.