Scheduled delivery of messages in IBM MQ - how far ahead in time? - spring

Scheduled Delivery of messages allows the calling application to specify a delivery delay when sending a message. The queue manager does not deliver the message until after the specified delivery delay has elapsed.
Question
Just to understand the viable operating parameters, how far ahead in time can we schedule the delayed delivery and expect the system to perform reliably ? E.g 1-2 days, weeks, months?
As correctly pointed out in the comments, the API signature does not impose any upper limit.
However, the intent of this question is about understanding the practical boundaries of a system beyond which it has not been tested or not guaranteed to perform reliably.
IBM documentation
I could not find anything specific in IBM's documentation in this context.
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSFKSJ_9.0.0/com.ibm.mq.dev.doc/q119200_.htm
AWS Simple Queue Services
To set the context, AWS SQS supports a maximum delay of 15 minutes
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSDeveloperGuide/sqs-message-timers.html
UPDATE
Added link to AWS SQS docs.
Thanks

Related

what are the retry settings for subscriber in pubsub and how to set them correctly in a spring application?

I have a spring service subcribing for messages from a topic in the google cloud pubsub (pulling). It is working correctly in general. But I want to have more control over resent messages. My service need sometimes to nack the message or just let the ackDeadline pass so that I would get the message later on again. While testing with single messages, the nacked message comes back to me almost immidetaly, and the ones I don't ack or nack at all, come back after 10 sec default for ackDeadline. I would like it to postpone the repeated consuming of these messages. I thought the retry setting are designed for such cases.
I should mention as well that I am currently testing locally with an emulator and create the subscription from code. I am using the PubSubAdmin for managing.
According to this docu I have tried to set those configuration in my profile config. like this:
spring.cloud.gcp.pubsub.subscriber.retry.initial-retry-delay-second: 4
spring.cloud.gcp.pubsub.subscriber.retry.max-attempts: 5
spring.cloud.gcp.pubsub.subscriber.retry.initial-rpc-timeout-seconds: 4
spring.cloud.gcp.pubsub.subscriber.retry.max-rpc-timeout-seconds: 8
spring.cloud.gcp.pubsub.subscriber.retry.max-retry-delay-seconds: 7
spring.cloud.gcp.pubsub.subscriber.retry.total-timeout-seconds: 3000
but it had no effect on the time of reoccuring of the messages.
Do I understand the meaning of retry settings wrongly? maybe they only take effect if there are some connection problems but not in nacking or lacking of acknowledgment cases? Or do I have to set the setting while using deploymentManager for creating the subscriptions and am not allowed to set them from the code? Or maybe setting them in (development) profile configs won't work with the PubSubAdmin?
Thanks for any suggestions!
edit: I want the first retry to happen after 5 seconds, but next retry 10 seconds later, etc. Plus I want to set the max retry number. So what I am not interested in is setting the ackDeadline just to a bigger number.
edit2: why nacking: one of the services (let's call it a bridge) is subscribing for the messages, has to validate each message and if ok pass it to another external system. this service is acting as a bridge for this system, as we can't work on this second system directly. in some cases the message need some extra information, so the bridge will try to fetch it somewhere else (there are a lot of microservices included) and it happens sometimes, that at this moment in time the extra information is not there (yet). So the first idea was to not ack the message and let it come later again. but I don't want to ask every 10 sec for the next 7 days (with ackDeadline), I want to just try few times, and if it is not there after 2 hours, it will never came. so we tried to nack and hoped those retry settings can help to manage the resending. But as they don't, I suppose the only way to go will be to build something for managing these messages in the bridge by myself. Maybe store message ids and the number of retry so that I can ack after for example 5 times and push the message to another topic to deal with it differently. Or are there any better solutions known?
Cloud Pub/Sub does not provide exponential backoff for specific messages. A nack has no effect other than to tell Cloud Pub/Sub that you were not able to handle the message.
I could provide a more useful answer if you were to document why you needed to nack the messages. If you are unable to handle the current load, you can use the flow control options described here to reduce the number of outstanding messages or bytes to your client. If you have messages that are known to be bad, you should instead ack them after pushing to another dead letter topic to be handled separately.
Response to edit 2:
If you have this scenario where the action to supplement the messages can fail, implement whatever backoff mechanism you want on that action yourself in your service. Set the max ack extension period when constructing your subscriber (setMaxAckExtensionPeriod in java) to ensure that your client will extend the ack deadline for each message long enough for your chain of retries.
Edit 2
Note that Pub/Sub now has built in support for Dead Lettering.
You can use PubSubSubscriberTemplate.modifyAckDeadline() to programmatically extend the deadlines of a batch of messages retrieved through pull. Each individual AcknowledgeablePubsubMessage also has a modifyAckDeadline() method, if you only need to extend deadline for a select few stragglers.
If all messages on that particular subscription need to have a longer acknowledgement period, a default can be set in GCP Console by editing the subscription and updating the "Acknowledgement Deadline" field.

Azure Queue delayed message

I has some strange behaviour on production deployment for azure queue messages:
Some of the messages in queues appears with big delay - minutes, and sometimes 10 minutes.
Befere you ask about setting delayTimeout when we put message to queue - we do not set delayTimeout for that message, so message should appear almost immedeatly after it was placed in queue.
At that moments we do not have a big load. So my instances has no work load, and able to process message fast, but they just don't appear.
Our service process millions of messages per month, we able to identify that 10-50 messages processed with very big delay, by that we fail SLA in front of our customers.
Does anyone have any idea what can be reason?
How to overcome?
Did anyone faced similar issues?
Some general ideas for troubleshooting:
Are you certain that the message was queued up for processing - ie the queue.addmessage operation returned successfully and then you are waiting 10 minutes - meaning you can rule out any client side retry policies etc as being the cause of the problem.
Is there any chance that the time calculation could be subject to some kind of clock skew problems. eg - if one of the worker roles pulling messages has its close out of sync with the other worker roles you could see this.
Is it possible that in the situations where the message is appearing to be delayed that a worker role responsible for pulling the messages is actually failing or crashing. If the client calls GetMessage but does not respond with an appropriate acknowledgement within the time specified by the invisibilityTimeout setting then the message will become visible again as the Queue Service assumes the client did not process the message. You could tell if this was a contributing factor by looking at the dequeue count on these messages that are taking longer. More information can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd179474.aspx.
Is it possible that the number of workers you have pulling items from the queue is insufficient at certain times of the day and the delays are simply caused by the queue being populated faster than you can pull messages from the queue.
Have you enabled logging for queues and then looked to see if you can find the specific operations (look at e2elatency and serverlatency).
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/tags/analytics+2d00+logging+_2600_amp_3b00_+metrics/. You should also enable client logging and try to determine if the client is having connectivity problems and the retry logic is possibly kicking in.
And finally if none of these appear to help can you please send me the server logs (and ideally the client side logs as well) along with your account information (no passwords) to JAHOGG at Microsoft dot com.
Jason
Azure Service bus has a property in the BrokeredMessage class called ScheduledEnqueueTimeUtc, it allows you to set a time for when the message is added to the queue (effectively creating a delay).
Are you sure that in your code your not setting this property, and this might be the cause for the delay?
You can find more info on this at this url: https://www.amido.com/azure-service-bus-how-to-delay-a-message-being-sent-to-the-queue/
If you are using WebJobs to process messages from the queue, it can be due to WebJobs configuration.
From an MSDN forum post by pranav rastogi:
Starting with 0.4.0-beta, the (WebJobs) SDK implements a random exponential back-off algorithm. As a result of this if there are no messages on the queue, the SDK will back off and start polling less frequently.
The following setting allows you to configure this behavior.
MaxPollingInterval for when a queue remains empty, the longest period of time to wait before checking for a message to. Default is 10min.
static void Main()
{
JobHostConfiguration config = new JobHostConfiguration();
config.Queues.MaxPollingInterval = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(1);
JobHost host = new JobHost(config);
host.RunAndBlock();
}

JMS 2.0: Shared-Durable-Consumer on Topic vs Asynchronous-Consumer on Queue; Ref. Official GlassFish 4.0 docs/javaee-tutorial Java EE 7

Ref: Official GlassFish 4.0 docs/javaee-tutorial Java EE 7
Firstly, let us start with the destination-type of: topic.
As per GlassFish 4.0 tutorial, section “46.4 Writing High Performance and Scalable JMS Applications”:
This section describes how to use the JMS API to write applications
that can handle high volumes of messages robustly.
In the subsection “46.4.2 Using Shared Durable Subscriptions”:
The SharedDurableSubscriberExample.java client shows how to use shared
durable subscriptions. It shows how shared durable subscriptions
combine the advantages of durable subscriptions (the subscription
remains active when the client is not) with those of shared consumers
(the message load can be divided among multiple clients).
When we run this example as per “46.4.2.1 To Run the ShareDurableSubscriberExample and Producer Clients”, it gives us the same effect/functionality as previous example on destination-type of queue: if we follow “46.2.6.2 To Run the AsynchConsumer and Producer Clients”, points 5 onwards – and modify it slightly using 2 consumer terminal-windows and 1 producer terminal-window.
Yes, section “45.2.2.2 Publish/Subscribe Messaging Style” does mention:
The JMS API relaxes this requirement to some extent by allowing
applications to create durable subscriptions, which receive messages
sent while the consumers are not active. Durable subscriptions provide
the flexibility and reliability of queues but still allow clients to
send messages to many recipients.
.. and anyway section “46.4 Writing High Performance and Scalable ..” examples are queue style – one message per consumer:
Each message added to the topic subscription is received by only one
consumer, similarly to the way in which each message added to a queue
is received by only one consumer.
What is the precise technical answer for: why, in this example, the use of Shared-Durable-Consumer on Topic is supposed to be, and mentioned under, “High Performance and Scalable JMS Application” vs. use of Asynchronous-Consumer on Queue?
I was wonderign about the same issue, so I found out the following link. I understand that John Ament gave you the right reponse, maybe it was just too short to get a full understand.
Basically, when you create a topic you are assuming that only the subscribed consumers will receive its messages. However processing such a message may requires a heavy processing; in such a cases you can create a shared topic using as much threads as you want.
Why not use a queue? The answer is quite simple, if you use a queue only one consumer will be able to handle such a message.
In order to clarify I will give you an example. Let's say a federal court publishes thousand of sentences every day and you have three distinct applications that depends on it.
Application A just copy the sentences to a database.
Application B parse the sentence and try to find out all relation between people around all previously saved sentences.
Application C parse the sentence and try to find out all relation between companies around all previously saved sentences.
You could use a Topic for the sentences, where Application A, B and C would be subscribed. However it easy to see that Application A can process the message very quicly while Application B and C may take some time. An available solution would consist of create a shared subscription for application B and another one to application C, so multiple threads could act on each of them simultaneouly...
...Of course there are other solutions, you could for example use a unshared topic (i.e. a regular one) and post all received messages on a ArrayBlockingQueue that would be handled by a pool of threads some time later; howecer in such a decision the developer would be the one to worry about queue handling.
Hope this can help.
The idea is that you can have multiple readers on a subscription. This allows you to read more messages faster, assuming you have threads available.
JMS Queue :
queued messages are persisted
each message is guaranteed to be delivered once-and-only-once, even no consumer running when the messages are sent.
JMS Shared Subscription :
subscription could have zero to many consumers
if messages sent when there is no subscriber (durable or not), message will never be received.

Scheduling a MDB

I'm looking for a way to schedule a MDB. My requirement is that the MDB is set to feed a system from the company. This system goes out for maintenance every night, but the other systems don't know about it and may keep trying to feed it. A persistent queue is great in the way that my messages could be pilled until system goes back online.
How could I manage that? I've run into that already: schedule a message driven bean to access a queue during certain times? but it uses java 7, and worst, message is lost if the server restarts (messages is taken out of the JMS Queue and kept in memory until timer process it).
Another use of this would be to implement a "retry" queue. In case of error I want to retry processing my message, but not immediately, after a certain amount time only.
Any ideas to keep my MDB offline for a certain amount of time?
Most versions of JBoss publish a management MBean that allows you to stop delivery on a MDB.
If you're using EJB3, however, they auto-start, so you will need to register a startup class to stop starting MDBs at boot time if boots occur in your MDB's blackout period. Once past that snafu, you can schedule a simple quartz job to start and stop the MDBs according to your delivery windows.
Well, it looks like there is no way to pause a MDB in a generic way. The best solution is, like most people will answer, to use the DLQ (or DMQ).
Now, if I want to introduce a timer on a message, I set the time to live of the producer to the amount of time I want the message to wait. Then I send it to a normal queue, lets say waitingQueue which has no consumer. After expiration, the message is sent to default destination (mq.sys.dmq for Glassfish MQ, make sure to create a jms resource with mq.sys.dmq as imqDestinationName). I have a MDB listening to the error queue and responsible of sending the message again. Now, if I want to "close" a queue for some time, when a message arrives in the queue, I check if current time is allowed or not. Just set the time to live to the amount of time before next opening hours and send it to waitingQueue.
The reason I didn't use it since the beginning is that I fell into a few pitfalls. Here are a few useful properties to set when using DMQ with Glassfish 3.1.1 and its embedded MQ.
imq.message.expiration.interval=1 that's for the poll interval on each queue before sending timed out messages to the DMQ. Default is 60 seconds. If like me you want to test your application with little latency, this is what you need.

Message queue that delivers delayed messages and checks for uniqness

I have an online service that receives incoming events (few every second). Service needs to process a job when there were no events for 30 seconds or more. Service is distributed across several PCs and uses Amazon webservices (SQS and SimpleDB) as a backbone.
I understand how can I schedule a job when there IS an incoming event (just put a message into message queue and you are done), but how can I schedule a job when the condition is "NO EVENTS FOR X SECONDS" ?
Ideally I would want a message queue that does not allow duplicate messages, allows scheduling for the future and allows adjusting "delivery date" on each message.
Is there such a message queue implementation?
Is this problem can be solved at all without persisting some data in database?
Thank you
Both BizTalk or SQL Server Service Broker fit your requirements. If they are too heavyweight, you could write a simple service that peeks the queue every couple of seconds and times out if it does not see anything in 30 seconds. That would be more difficult to scale horizontally across machines, however.

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