Removing a message that is being redelivered - jms

I have a set up of an ActiveMQ broker and a single consumer. Consumer gets a message that he is not able to process because a service that it depends has a bug (once fixed it will be fine). So the message keeps being redelivered (consumer redelivery) - we use JMS sessions. With our current configuration it will keep redelivering it every 10 minutes for 1 day. That obviously causes a problem because other messages are not being consumed.
In order to solve this problem I have accessed the queue through JMX and tried to delete that message but it is not there. I guess it is cached on the consumer and not visible at the broker.
Is there any way to delete this message other than restarting the application?
Is it possible to configure the redelivery mechanism so that such message (that causes a live lock eventually) is put at the end of the queue so that other messages can be processed?
The 10 minutes for 1 day redelivery policy should stay as is.

I think you're right that the messages are stuck in the consumer's prefetch buffer, and I don't know of a way to delete them from there.
I'd change your redelivery policy to send to the DLQ after the second failure, with a much shorter interval between them, like 30 seconds, and I'd configure the DLQ strategy as an individualDeadLetterStrategy so you get a separate DLQ containing only messages from this particular queue. Then set up a consumer on this DLQ to move the messages to (the end of) the main queue whenever your reprocessing condition is met (whether that's after a certain delay, or based on reading some flag value from a database, or whatever). This consumer is where you'd implement "every 10 minutes for 1 day" logic, instead of in the redelivery policy where you currently have it.
That will keep the garbage ones out of the main queue so they don't delay other messages from being consumed, but still ensure that they will be reprocessed later. And it will put them on the broker instead of in the consumer's prefetch buffer, where you can view and delete them.

The only way to get it to the back of the queue is to reproduce it to the queue. Redelivery polices can only be configured down to the destination on the connection factory.
Given that you already have a connection, it shouldn't be to hard to create a producer that can either move the given message to a DLQ or produce it back to the queue when you run into that particular bug.

Setting jms.nonBlockingRedelivery=true on the connection factory resolved the problem. Now even if there is a message redelivered it does not block processing of other Messages.

Related

How can I make sure that if a message is not consumed from a JMS queue, it should get deleted after a certain time?

I want the messages to get deleted from the JMS queue if they are not consumed within a certain time limit. What attribute or setting should I configure in while creating the queue?
I have tried expiry but even after the expiry time, I can see the message in the queue
Some JMS implementations will expire messages on queue, but some drop expired messages when consumed. So even though you can see an expired message in the queue, it should not be received by any messages receiver.

ActiveMQ not delivering/dispatching persistent messages on queues

I am using ActiveMQ v5.10.0 and having an issue almost every weekend where my ActiveMQ instance stops delivering persistent messages sent on queues to the consumers. I have not been able to figure out what could be causing this.
While the issue was happening I tried following things:
I added a new consumer on the affected queue but it didn't receive
any messages.
I restarted the original consumer but it didn't receive any messages after the restart.
I purged the messages that were held on the queue but then messages started accumulating again and broker didn't deliver any of the new messages. When I purged the expiry count didn't increase neither the dequeue and dispatch counters.
I sent 100 non-persistent messages on the affected queue, surprisingly it received those messages.
I tried sending 100 persistent messages on that queue, it didn't deliver anyone of them, all the messages were held by broker.
I created a fresh new queue and sent 100 persistent messages and none of them was delivered to the consumer whereas all the non-persistent messages were delivered.
The same things happen if I send persistent or non-persistent messages from STOMP producers. Surprisingly all this happened only for queues, topic consumers were able to receive persistent as well as non-persistent messages.
I have already posted this on ActiveMQ user forum: http://activemq.2283324.n4.nabble.com/Broker-not-delivering-persistent-messages-to-consumer-on-queue-td4691245.html but no one from ActiveMQ has suggested anything.
The jstack output also isn't very helping.
More details:
1. I am not using any selectors, message groups feature
2. I have disabled producer flow control in my setup
I want some suggestions as to what configuration values might cause this issue- memory limits, message TTL etc.

Blocking competing clients to take message from ActiveMQ

We have a JMS queue and multiple competing clients are reading from this queue.
Once the message is taken and successfully processed, we want to send the acknowledge to delete ( i.e. CLIENT ACKNOWLEDGE )
However, we want to make sure that if one client has picked the message another client should not take it from the queue.
Does activeMQ provide this feature out of the box using some configuration ?
Moreover:
If the message processing failed after picking the message, so it could not be acknowledged back, in this scenario we should like other client thread to pickup the message. Is it possible out of the box with configuration , may be specifying timeout values ?
Regards,
JE
You need to take some time to understand the difference between a Topic and a Qeueue in order to understand why the first question is not an issue.
For the second question it depends a bit on the ACK mode you are using and how you are processing messages sync or async. Normally for processing where you want to control redeliveries you would do the work inside of a transaction and if the processing fails the message would be redelivered when the TX is rolled back. ActiveMQ supports redelivery policies both client side and broker side that control how many time a message will be redelivered before sent to a DLQ.

JMS/Active MQ - broker vs consumer redelivery

As I understand (http://activemq.apache.org/message-redelivery-and-dlq-handling.html) a redelivery can be done by either a consumer or a broker.
I have some questions though:
How does the redelivery by a consumer work underneath? Does the consumer cache the message from a broker and redeliver it locally? What does happen if a consumer terminates inbetween? Such message will be lost? I think that as long as the consumer does not acknowledge the message it shouldn't be. But in such case, the message will be still available on the broker?
Are there any guidelines when to use broker vs consumer redelivery? Any recommendations?
The consumer does cache and redeliver the message to the client locally, until the redelivery count is met, then automatically acks the message as bad (posin ack). A consumer can control if it gets marked as redelivered depending on the acknowledgment mode. If for whatever reason a consumer can't or does not want to process a message, it can also kick it back and it will be available for consumption again if it closes the session.
The broker will hold onto the message until it gets an ack from the consumer. If your consumer is set to AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE then it is possible you could lose the message if an unhandled exception occurs or the consumer ends unexpectedly for example.
Otherwise, if your consumer is using transactions or CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE it will give you the control on when that occurs.
With transactions, if the consumer drops prior to a commit it will be available for the next consumer or whenever that consumer reconnects.
I've always used transaction over CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE so I don't want to say for sure that the message will be lost in if the Session.recover() is not called before the consumer goes down or not.
From a consumer stand point, this is also known as retry logic.
Regarding broker vs consumer redelivery: By default, the broker just keeps giving the consumer the same message until the redelivery count is met. If you tell the broker not to redeliver it after a given amount of time, then your consumer can work on consuming other messages that may be able to be processed.
When to do this is really up to what is going on in your application. Maybe a specific message needs to be put to a database and that database is not available at the moment and you want to move on to messages that go elsewhere/have another purpose?

ActiveMq, what happens if Client terminates before Ack

I have a persistent queue, non-transacted, client-acknowledge, the consumers read with jms.prefetchPolicy.queuePrefetch=1&wireFormat.maxInactivityDuration=50000
and once a consumer processes a message, it ack's the message.
If the consumer reads the message, and before it can send an ack, the process terminates abruptly, what happens in ActiveMq? (What ActiveMq parameters come into play here?)
How is that different than if the the consumer will take 10 minutes to process the message (so the consumer task is alive and working), how does ActiveMq know the message is still being worked on? (Does it monitor the TCP/IP connection, if the connection dies, it assumes the message will not be Ack'ed?)
How do I determine if a message is a "poison pill", i.e. it makes the consumers crash? (the redelivery count seems to be valid if the consumer task does not die; is there an internal counter in the message that says "it was been read n times without being successfully ack'ed?")
As an experiment, I sent 6 messages, one of them being a "poison pill" (kills the consumer before the consumer can send the ack), with 2 simultaneous consumers running (and automatically restarting consumers to bring the count to 2 whenever a consumer dies). Looking at the queue (using jconsole, I enable jmx using broker.setUseJmx(true)), 4 messages were delivered, 2 are in-flight. Why would there be 2 in-flight instead of just one?
I've been reading the ActiveMq and JMS specs for a while without clear/conclusive answers, so any insights on what parameters come into play, and if there are any known bugs, will be greatly useful.
This is purely based on my understanding of JMS - may not be completely correct:
If the consumer reads the message, and before it can send an ack, the process terminates abruptly, what happens in ActiveMq
My understanding is that since this happens in the context of a session with the JMS provider, JMS provider knows if the session is no longer active or has failed and any message not acknowledged as part of the session will be redelivered when the session is re-established.
How do I determine if a message is a "poison pill", i.e. it makes the consumers crash?
Like you have mentioned, the JMS provider keeps track of the # of times the message was redelivered possibly in the header of the message
4 messages were delivered, 2 are in flight
Not sure about this point

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