Retry after delay on back pressure with Spring Project Reactor? - spring

Background
I'm trying to implement something similar to a simple non-blocking rate-limiter with Spring Project Reactor version 3.3.0. For example, to limit the number to 100 requests per second I use this implementation:
myFlux
.bufferTimeout(100, Duration.ofSeconds(1))
.delayElements(Duration.ofSeconds(1))
..
This works fine for my use case but if the subscriber doesn't keep up with the rate of the myFlux publisher it'll (rightly) throw an OverflowException:
reactor.core.Exceptions$OverflowException: Could not emit buffer due to lack of requests
at reactor.core.Exceptions.failWithOverflow(Exceptions.java:215)
Suppressed: reactor.core.publisher.FluxOnAssembly$OnAssemblyException:
Assembly trace from producer [reactor.core.publisher.FluxLift] :
reactor.core.publisher.Flux.bufferTimeout(Flux.java:2780)
In my case it's important that all elements are consumed by the subscriber so e.g. dropping on back pressure (onBackpressureDrop()) is not acceptable.
Question
Is there a way to, instead of dropping elements on back pressure, just pause the publishing of messages until the subscriber has caught up? In my case myFlux is publishing a finite, but large set of, elements persisted in a durable database so dropping elements should not be required imho.

bufferTimeout(int maxSize, Duration maxTime) requests an unbounded amount of messages, thus being insensitive to backpressure. That makes it unsuitable for your case.
On a conceptual level, bufferTimeout cannot be backpressure sensitive, because you clearly instruct the publisher to emit one batch (even if it is empty) for every elapsed duration. If the subscriber is too slow, this will - rightfully - cause an overflow.
Instead, try:
myFlux
.delayElements(Duration.ofMillis(10))
.buffer(100)
or
myFlux
.buffer(100)
.delayElements(Duration.ofSeconds(1))
buffer(int maxSize) requests the correct amount upstream (request * maxSize), and so is sensitive to backpressure from the subscribers.

Related

Spring JMS Message Listener - DMLC - what is benefit of polling?

I know the DefaultMessageListenerContainer polls by design. And that the receiveTimeout which sets the polling interval defaults to 1 second.
The way I understand it is that the DMLC will issue a get, and waits the 'receiveTimeout' defined interval (1 second) before it times out and issues another get.
From what I have read, we can set this receiveTimout value to a larger value and have NO effect on messages getting picked up from the MQ because the active 'get' will sit on the listener until a message arrives... and once/if the timeout interval expires it will just submit another get which remains active on the queue until a message arrives.
So my questions is, what is the benefit of a smaller receiveTimout interval? If we are always going to process a message when it arrives, why on earth would we want to poll the queue every second?
We are running many large applications, and the polling is simply running the CPU usage/bill through the roof, and I cannot find a justification for this.
Yes - the 1 second receive timeout can be very CPU intensive with a large number of queues.
The general idea for the DefaultMessageListenerContainer was to wait for a bit (1 second seems to be a very short wait period), and then, if you don't get a message, it actually tears everything down and does a full reconnect. This is kind of a poor-mans error handling. "If I haven't heard from the broker, assume that something is broken, drop everything and reconnect". If the reconnect were not so expensive, it might not be a bad strategy. Or if you have only one queue. Or maybe you are expecting 10 messages a second and do want to reconnect if a second goes by. If you have a reasonable number of destinations, the reconnect traffic can get downright abusive.
For IBM MQ, failures on the JMS connection/session are reliably picked up. You don't have the, "it just sits there not getting any messages for some reason" scenario. So setting the timeout to 10 minutes (whatever) would be fine.
Note that if you are running in a JEE application server, and your JMS connections are managed by the JCA, then that layer is responsible for detecting bad connections and you don't have to worry about it up in the application layer.
With Camel and for SpringBoot GitHub might be useful.

Kafka consumption rate is low as compare to message publish on topic

Hi I am new to Spring Boot #kafkaListener. Service A publishes message on kafka topic continuously. My service consume the message from that topic. Partitions of topic in both service (Service A and my service) is same, but rate of consuming the message is low as compare to publishing the message. I can see consumer lag in kafka.
How can I fill that lag? Or how can I increase the rate of consuming the message?
Can I have separate thread for processing message. I can consume a message in Queue (acknowledge after adding into queue) and another thread will read from that queue to process that message.
Is there any settings or property provides by Spring to increase the rate of consumption?
Lag is something you want to reduce, not "fill".
Can you consume faster? Yes. For example, changing the consumer max.poll.records can be increased from the default of 500, per your I/O rates (do your own benchmarking) to fetch more data at once from Kafka. However, this will increase the surface area for consumer error handling.
You can also consume and immediately ack the offsets, then toss records into a queue for processing. There is possibility for skipping records in this case, though, as you move processing off the critical path for offset tracking.
Or you could only commit once per consumer poll loop, rather than ack every record, but this may result in duplicate record processing.
As mentioned before, adding partitions is the best way to scale consumption after distributing producer workload
You generally will need to increase the number of partitions (and concurrency in the listener container) if a single consumer thread can't keep up with the production rate.
If that doesn't help, you will need to profile your consumer app to see where the bottleneck is.

One slow ActiveMQ consumer causing other consumers to be slow

I'm looking for help regarding a strange issue where a slow consumer on a queue causes all the other consumers on the same queue to start consuming messages at 30 second intervals. That is all consumers but the slow one don't consumer messages as fast as they can, instead they wait for some magical 30s barrier before consuming.
The basic flow of my application goes like this:
a number of producers place messages onto a single queue. Messages can have different JMSXGroupIDs
a number of consumers listen to messages on that single queue
as standard practice the JMSXGroupIDs get distributed across the consumers
at some point one of the consumers becomes slow and can't process messages very quickly
the slow consumer ends up filling its prefetch buffer on the broker and AMQ recognises that it is slow (default behaviour)
at that point - or some 'random' but close time later - all consumers except the slow one start to only consume messages at the same 30s intervals
if the slow consumer becomes fast again then things very quickly return to normal operation and the 30s barrier goes away
I'm at a loss for what could be causing this issue, or how to fix it, please help.
More background and findings
I've managed to reliably reproduce this issue on AMQ 5.8.0, 5.9.0 (where the issue was originally noticed) and 5.9.1, on fresh installs and existing ops-managed installs and on different machines some vm and some not. All linux installs, different OSs and java versions.
It doesn't appear to be affected by anything prefetch related, that is: changing the prefetch value from 1 to 10 to 1000 didn't stop the issue from happening
[red herring?] Enabling debug logs on the amq instance shows logs relating to the periodic check for messages that can be expired. The queue doesn't have an expiry policy so I can only think that the scheduled expireMessagesPeriod time is just waking amq up in such a way that it then sends messages to the non-slow consumers.
If the 30s mode is entered then left then entered again the seconds-past-the-minute time is always the same, for example 14s and 44s past the minute. This is true across all consumers and all machines hosting those consumers. Those barrier points do change after restarts of amq.
While not strictly a solution to the problem, further investigation has uncovered the root cause of this issue.
TL;DR - It's known behaviour and won't be fixed before Apollo
More Details
Ultimately this is caused by the maxPageSize property and the fact that AMQ will only apply selection criteria to messages in memory. Generally these are message selectors (property = value), but in my case they are JMSXGroupID=>Consumer assignments.
As messages are received by the queue they get paged into memory and placed into a collection (named pagedInPendingDispatch in the source). To dispatch messages AMQ will scan through this list of messages and try to find a consumer that will accept it. That includes checking the group id, message selector and prefetch buffer space. For our use case we aren't using message selectors but we are using groups. If no consumer can take the message then it is left in the collection and will be checked again at the next tick.
In order to stop the pagedInPendingDispatch collection from eating up all the resources available there is a suggested limit to the size of this queue configured via the maxPageSize property. This property isn't actually a maximum, it's more a hint as to whether, under normal conditions, new message arrivals should be paged in memory or paged to disk.
With these two pieces of information and a slow consumer it turns out that eventually all the messages in the pagedInPendingDispatch collection end up only being consumable by the slow consumer, and hence the collection effectively gets blocked and no other messages get dispatched. This explains why the slow consumer wasn't affected by the 30s interval, it had maxPageSize messages waiting delivery already.
This doesn't explain why I was seeing the non-slow consumers receive messages every 30s though. As it turns out, paging messages into memory has two modes, normal and forced. Normal follows the process outlined above where the size of the collection is compared to the maxPageSize property, when forced, however, messages are always paged into memory. This mode exists to allow you to browse through messages that aren't in memory. As it happens this forced mode is also used by the expiry mechanism to allow AMQ to expire messages that aren't in memory.
So what we have now is a collection of messages in memory that are all targeted for dispatch to the same consumer, a consumer that won't accept them because it is slow or blocked. We also have a backlog of messages awaiting delivery to all consumers. Every expireMessagesPeriod milliseconds a task runs that force pages messages into memory to check if they should be expired or not. This adds those messages onto the pages in collection which now contains maxPageSize messages for the slow consumer and N more messages destined for any consumer. Those messages get delivered.
QED.
References
Ticket referring to this issue but for message selectors instead
Docs relating to the configuration properties
Somebody else with this issue but for selectors

MQ selective dequeue speed is sometimes woeful

I have a process that uses JMSTemplate to selectively dequeue from an MQ queue based on JMS header values.
When the dequeue query matches messages at the front of the queue, the dequeue rate is approximately 60-70 msg/second. However, when the query matches messages only 50, 100 or 200 messages deep the dequeue rate drops to 1 msg / 3-4 seconds.
The fast dequeue query is ThreadId='24' or ThreadId='PRIMARY'. The slow dequeue query is ThreadId='24'.
The real reason for the slow processing times might be something else, but I observe the change in processing times with nothing more than the change in deselect query.
I suspect this processing speed is not usual. What could possibly be going wrong?
Querying deep queues by headers is not really recommended as the headers are not indexed. This might be the issue. Queries on CorrelationId and MessageId (if they are on the format 'ID:48-hex-digits') will be indexed and are very quick (~1ms / query on very deep queues, depending on setup).
We faced this issue as well and choose to encode a correlation identifier in the correlation id header instead of in JMS string properties (MQRFH2/usr) headers.
This was on MQ 7.0

ActiveMQ: Slow processing consumers

Concerning ActiveMQ: I have a scenario where I have one producer which sends small (around 10KB) files to the consumers. Although the files are small, the consumers need around 10 seconds to analyze them and return the result to the producer. I've researched a lot, but I still cannot find answers to the following questions:
How do I make the broker store the files (completely) in a queue?
Should I use ObjectMessage (because the files are small) or blob messages?
Because the consumers are slow processing, should I lower their prefetchLimit or use a round-robin dispatch policy? Which one is better?
And finally, in the ActiveMQ FAQ, I read this - "If a consumer receives a message and does not acknowledge it before closing then the message will be redelivered to another consumer.". So my question here is, does ActiveMQ guarantee that only 1 consumer will process the message (and therefore there will be only 1 answer to the producer), or not? When does the consumer acknowledge a message (in the default, automatic acknowledge settings) - when receiving the message and storing it in a session, or when the onMessage handler finishes? And also, because the consumers are so slow in processing, should I change some "timeout limit" so the broker knows how much to wait before giving the work to another consumer (this is kind of related to my previous questions)?
Not sure about others, but here are some thoughts.
First: I am not sure what your exact concern is. ActiveMQ does store messages in a data store; all data need NOT reside in memory in any single place (either broker or client). So you should actually be good in that regard; earlier versions did require that all ids needed to fit in memory (not sure if that was resolved), but even that memory usage would be low enough unless you had tens of millions of in-queue messages.
As to ObjectMessage vs blob; raw byte array (blob) should be most compact representation, but since all of these get serialized for storage, it only affects memory usage on client. Pre-fetch mostly helps with access latency; but given that they are slow to process, you probably don't need any prefetching; so yes, either set it to 1 or 2 or disable altogether.
As to guarantees: best that distributed message queues can guarantee is either at-least-once (with possible duplicates), or at-most-once (no duplicates, can lose messages). It is usually better to take at-least-once, and make clients to de-duping using client-provided ids. How acknowledgement is sent is defiend by JMS specification so you can read more about JMS; this is not ActiveMQ specific.
And yes, you should set timeout high enough that worker typically can finish up work, including all network latencies. This can slow down re-transmit of dropped messages (if worked dies), but it is probably not a problem for you.

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