Spring XD - Event delivery guarantees - spring-xd

When I create a stream composed of multiple modules, are there any guarantees provided on the event delivery to each module. Is there a possibility of events being replayed?
What if the processor module takes a long time to process one event but crashes in the middle of the processing. What happens to that event when the module is restarted in a container?

See the documentation re: Message Bus Configuration and specifically Error Handling (Message Delivery Failures).
The retry configuration can be modified at the bus or individual module/stream level.

Related

ActiveMQ- Can I Replace The Scheduler Plugin With A Delayed Message Queue?

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.

How do I achieve a redelivery delay in azure service bus with amqp using rhea

I'm using rhea in a nodejs application to send messages around over Azure Service Bus using AMQP. My problem is as follows:
Sometimes a message processing attempt can fail because of something that is out of our hands. For instance, a call to some API could fail because a service is down. At that point we unlock the message so it can be picked up at a later time or by another instance. After a certain amount of retries (when delivery-count has hit a certain max) it just ends up in DLQ.
What I want to achieve is that between each delivery attempt there is an increasing pause so the X amount of retries don't just occur in rapid succession until the max is hit. This way I can give whatever is causing the failure some time to come back up if it's just a matter of waiting for some service to become available again. If that doesn't work the message can go to DLQ anyway.
Is there some setting in azure service bus that will achieve this or will I have to program this into my own application?
if you explicitly want to delay processing you can en-queue a new message with ScheduledEnqueueTime set of later delivery (using the message.Clone() function can help in creating the cloned message). You also have the ability to call message.Defer() and will not deliver this message again until you call Receive(Sequenceid) for that specific message at a later time .

Apache Kafka: How to check, that an event has been fully handled?

I am facing an issue when decoupling two systems by an event/message broker like Apache Kafka. The issue is related to a frontend triggering actions in a backend:
How does the producer (frontend service) know, that the published event has been properly handled by all the backend services (as consumers), if the publisher does not know neither the "identities" nor the count of consuming backends?
To be precise: Users can change for example their email address using a frontend UI. An associated service publishes that "change request" event to an appropriate topic within Kafka. The UI form is then "locked" to prevent subsequent change requests, until the change event has been fully processed by every consumer. But it's unclear how to detect this state.
You can use another topic to publish handled jobs. So your front-end publishes to one topic and your back-end publishes to another once it is done.
In Kafka terms, neither the producer nor consumer are considered backend - they're both clients connecting to a broker, which is generally considered to be the backend.
A producer will know that it has produced a message successfully, by virtue of the acks setting. A consumer will read a message, and then at a later point, its offset will be updated to a point corresponding to the last message it read. However, there is generally no interaction between a producer and a consumer, and they are generally completely unaware of one another.

Monitoring JMS queues in WAS

Little bit of backgroud: I need to improve the performance of one of our batch framework. There, batch inputs are sent to a JMS queue. Further, at the queue endpoint, we have a MDB, which is consuming the messages. Now, what i suspect here that if there are large number of messages, there is no MDB instance available to consume the messages as all of them are held up in processing the previous messages. To improve this, i am thinking of implementing a threadpool in the MDB business logic so that once the MDB has received the message and deliver it to the thread, it gets free for consuming another message.
Now before implementing this, i want to monitor my JMS queues to check if the messages are really waiting in the queues or not. So i need to know if this monitoring can be done via some WAS admin console or some JMX application. My main purpose is to check the waiting time of each jms message in the queue.
First, you can set the number of processes (MDB instances) that will consumes the Q in parallel. The default is 10 (Per member of the cluster..).
With the console: Resources -> JMS -> activation specifications, Set "Maximum concurrent MDB invocations per endpoint" which is defined as `"The maximum number of endpoints to which messages are delivered concurrently."``
As for monitoring the Q and generating some load, you can have a look at JMSToolBox on sourceforge
In the "Destination information" dialog in JMSToolBox, you will also be able to see the number of concurrent consumers on the Q
Also if you want to measure the time spend by a message in the Q, just compute the difference between the current time and the JMSTimestamp JMS standard property from the message it is process by the MDB in the onMessage() method

JMS Producer-Consumer-Observer (PCO)

In JMS there are Queues and Topics. As I understand it so far queues are best used for producer/consumer scenarios, where as topics can be used for publish/subscribe. However in my scenario I need a way to combine both approaches and create a producer-consumer-observer architecture.
Particularly I have producers which write to some queues and workers, which read from these queues and process the messages in those queues, then write it to a different queue (or topic). Whenever a worker has done a job my GUI should be notified and update its representation of the current system state. Since workers and GUI are different processes I cannot apply a simple observer pattern or notify the GUI directly.
What is the best way to realize this using a combination of queues and/or topics? The GUI should always be notified, but it should never consume anything from a queue?
I would like to solve this with JMS directly and not use any additional technology such as RMI to implement the observer part.
To give a more concrete example:
I have a queue with packages (PACKAGEQUEUE), produced by machine (PackageProducer)
I have a worker which takes a package from the PACKAGEQUEUE adds an address and then writes it to a MAILQUEUE (AddressWorker)
Another worker processes the MAILQUEUE and sends the packages out by mail (MailWorker).
After step 2. when a message is written to the MAILQUEUE, I want to notify the GUI and update the status of the package. Of course the GUI should not consume the messages in the MAILQUEUE, only the MailWorker must consume them.
You can use a combination of queue and topic for your solution.
Your GUI application can subscribe to a topic, say MAILQUEUE_NOTIFICATION. Every time (i.e at step 2) PackageProducer writes message to MAILQUEUE, a copy of that message should be published to MAILQUEUE_NOTIFICATION topic. Since the GUI application has subscribed to the topic, it will get that publication containing information on status of the package. GUI can be updated with the contents of that publication.
HTH

Resources