I want to inform the seller, that the buyer is coming soon (about 2 hours before pickup time) via mail.
I would normally do it the hard way with CRON and a database table. Checking hourly if I find an order with pickup time minus 2 hours, only then sending the mail out.
Now, I would like to know if you would recommend using Queueing Jobs for sending Mails out.
With
$when = now()->addDays(10); //I would dynamically set the date
Mail::to($order->seller())
->later($when, new BuyerIsComing($order));
I can delay the delivery of a queued email message.
But how safe would this be? Especially, if someone is ordering something but is picking it up in let us exaggerate two months?
Is the Laravel queueing system rigid enough to behave correctly after long delays (i.e. 2 months)?
Edit
I'm using Redis for Queueing
You actually have nothing to worry about. Sending mail usually increases the response time of your application, so it's a good thing you want to delay the sending.
Queues are the way to go and it's pretty easy to setup in Laravel. Laravel supports a couple of them out of the box. I would advise you start with database and then try beanstalk etc.
Lastly and somehow more importantly, use a process manager like Supervisor to monitor and maintain your queue workers...
Take a look at https://laravel.com/docs/5.7/queues for more insight.
Cheers.
If by safe, you mean reliable, then it would be little different than sending an email immediately. If there's ever a possibility that your server "hiccups" and doesn't send an email, that possibility would be the same now as 10 minutes from now. Once the job is in the queue, it is persisted until completion (unless you use a memory-based driver, like Redis, which could get reset if the server reboots).
If you are using a database queue driver or remote, the log of queued jobs will remain even if the server is unavailable for a short period of time. Your queue will be honored even if the exact time stamp for when you want to send the job has expired. For instance if you schedule to send an email at 1:00pm but your server is down at that exact moment, when it comes back online it will still see the job because it is stored as incomplete and the time for the job is in the past, which will trigger the execution of the job at the next time your queue worker checks the job list.
Of course, this assumes that you have your queue worker set up to always check jobs and automatically restart, even after a server failure, but that's a different discussion with lots of solutions...such as those shown here.
If you're using database driver with Laravel queues to process your email then you don't need to worry about anything.
Jobs are only removed from Jobs table if they are successfully completed otherwise their next attempt time is set which is few minutes in future and they are executed again (if your queue worker is online).
So its completely safe to use Laravel queues
Related
I worked a little with the ActiveMQ scheduler plugin. This simplifies scheduling messages for delivery with a delay at low volume, but as I get into the 100ks of messages the system breaks down in two key ways.
It's very slow (compared to queues) to enqueue messages in the scheduler.
Attempting to view the schedules in the dashboard crashes the ActiveMQ instance.
The existing scheduler feels a little bolted on and does not perform as expected. So, rethinking the problem I would like to have a jobs and jobs-scheduled queue. Messages sent to the jobs-scheduled queue will have a ttl header with the unix timestamp for when it should be delivered. A process will run on a cron job which will take messages from the jobs-scheduled queue and send it to the jobs queue using a selector to just pick out the messages with an elapsed ttl convert_string_expressions:ttl < %(now)s.
My two questions are:
Will this strategy work for delaying messages at scale or will I find scaling pains around the selector? These messages will be persisted if that makes a difference.
Is there an existing feature in ActiveMQ that will allow me to send messages from one queue to another with a selector query?
ActiveMQ is a message broker not a job scheduler so what you are trying to do is really outside the scope of the what the broker is intended to do. Yes ActiveMQ does have a scheduled message feature but this is not intended for large scale job queue type work, it is a simple feature to provide some minimal delayed delivery.
What you are looking for sounds more like Quartz or some other batch job scheduling library. You could develop your own Job scheduler implementation for ActiveMQ or do something in a plugin but you are really trying to run against the grain of what a broker is meant to do which is deliver messages as quickly as possible in a decoupled manner.
Side note-- potentially off-topic.
I've had to solve a similar situation in the past where it made a lot of sense to load up the queues with messages ahead of time to cut down on the total transfer time.
I solved it by using Camel routes and a side-channel activation. Camel allows you to programmatically start and stop routes, so you can load up a queue with no consumers for the data for a given time period. Then using a dedicated queue for control you send the 'start' message. The control route receives the 'start' message, and then activates the main data processing route. You then need to configure some sort of 'stop' message semantic to be ready for the next time periods run.
Effectively, you get the delayed behavior pattern with much more control over scheduling and cut down on the data-to-queue loading time problem. You can also solve the scaling problem by loading the data across more than one queue.
I've created two services.
One of them (scheduler) only requests to the other (backoffice) for performing some "large" operations.
When backoffice receives a request:
first creates a mark (key on redis) in order to set that the process has started.
Each time a request is reached:
backoffice checks if the mark exist.
When it exists means that the previous process has not yet finished, and escape it.
Perform the large process.
When process is finished, the previous key in redis is removed.
It would be something like this:
if (key exists)
return;
make long process... (1);
remove key;
The problem arises when service is destroyed when the process has not already finished and then it doesn't removes the mark on redis. It means the process will never run again.
Is there any way to solve this kind of problems?
The way to solve this problem is use an existing engine as building custom scalable and robust solution for reliable service orchestration is really hard.
I recommend looking at Uber Cadence Workflow which would allow to convert your pseudocode into a real production application with minor changes.
You can fire a background job that updates timestamp under the key, e.g. every minute.
When service attempts to start the process it must verify key existence (as it does now) + timestamp under the key. If it is more than 1 minute ago then the previous attempt is stale and you can start over.
Sounds like you should be using a messaging queue to schedule tasks for the back office service. Queuing solutions like RabbitMQ allow you to manually acknowledge (or “ack”) that the process is complete. Whenever a subscriber crashes, the queue detects that the connection dropped without acknowledgement and will re-enqueue the same task which will be picked up by the next available subscriber. Here’s another thread talking about this problem specifically focused on messaging queues:
What happens to fetched messages when RabbitMQ consumer crashes?
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();
}
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.
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.