We are using rabbitmq 3.0.1 on CentOS 6, and as a client Spring spring-rabbit version 1.1.2.RELEASE. (I know these aren't the latest versions, see later).
We send messages to rabbitmq via this client. These messages are initiated via an external rest call. Someone else calls our web service updates the database and sends the amqp message. I would like to be informed if rabbitmq blocks the client - for instance if the disk_free_limit threshold is reached.
Importantly, I would like to be informed in the same thread as that processing the web request, so that I can rollback the transaction.
Our web service can also update a database (within a transaction obviously). Normally, this works fine. However, under certain circumstances, rabbitmq can block our web server - the most obvious being when the disk_free_limit is reached. This blocks the web server Thread, indefinitely. The external caller of the web service will obviously time out after a sensible period, but the thread in our web service doesn't - it stays around, and keeps the resources, and importantly the transaction open.
The web server is blocking the thread because it is transactional. It isn't the initial message which is blocking, it is the commit. I assume that rabbitmq is blocking because it can't persist it or something like that. The thread is blocking until rabbitmq sends the commit ok message back. The bit of code is deep within the rabbitmq implementation - com.rabbitmq.client.impl.ChannelN
public Tx.CommitOk More ...txCommit() throws IOException
{
return (Tx.CommitOk) exnWrappingRpc(new Tx.Commit()).getMethod();
}
and this eventually calls the following method from com.rabbitmq.client.impl.AMQChannel
public T More ...getReply() throws ShutdownSignalException
{
return _blocker.uninterruptibleGetValue();
}
The preferable solution for this would be some sort of timeout on the txCommit - then I could throw an exception and fail the web service with a 500 or whatever. I can't find any way of doing this.
What I have found is:
addBlockedListener - this adds a listener on a message sent by rabbitmq when this it is blocked. This is good, but the message will is treated by another thread - so I can't fail the web service. Using this I can at least log the fact that rabbitmq is blocked, through syslog or whatever. However, this isn't available on the version that we run - we would have to upgrade to the latest. We would prefer not to do this because of the testing it would imply.
setConnectionTimeout(int) - this sets the connection timeout for the initial connection to rabbitmq. This doesn't apply in my case, because rabbitmq is up and running and accepts the connection.
AmqpTemplate.setReplyTimeout() - as shown above, this reply timeout does not apply to the commit.
I fully understand that this situation (disk_free_limit threshold is breached) is a situation which should not occur in a production system. However, I would like to be able to cope nicely with this situation so that my application behaves nicely when one of its components (rabbitmq) has a problem.
So, what other options do I have? Is there any way, short of rewriting portions of the spring amqp client or removing the transactionality of doing what I want?
Related
I have REST API gateway which calls one of the microservices with MassTransit request client. This request is not durable and is meant to live for a short time - essentially it's just replacement of "traditional" synchronous (via HTTP/GRPC/etc) gateway-microservice communication.
On microservice side I have consumer which under the hood uses DbContext and Transaction (EFC) to perform some work in database. After the work is done it should publish "WorkDoneEvent" (to be consumed later by other microservices) and return result of the work to api gateway. Event must be published atomically along with transaction used to perform the work. It does not matter if ApiGateway will receive response / will retry request - as soon as transaction is commited both work result and sending "WorkDoneEvent" must be guaranteed.
Normally this is done with transactional outbox which first saves published event to database within same transaction as the work is done. (And then some process constantly "polls" outbox and tries send message to the broker, when done it removes message from outbox). As far as I know.
MassTransit seems to have transactional outbox built in: https://masstransit-project.com/advanced/middleware/transactions.html#transactional-bus.
However in docs it clearly states:
Never use the TransactionalBus or TransactionalEnlistmentBus when writing consumers. These tools are very specific and should be used only in the scenarios described.
And this is exactly what I want to do...
Why I should not do it?
I'd suggest using the InMemoryOutbox, which is part of MassTransit. It's significantly lighter weight, is designed to work in a consumer, and will not publish your events until after the consumer has completed (but prior to acknowledging the message at the broker). The only consideration is that your consumer should be idempotent (which needs to be the case in your approach as well) and if the operation was already performed on a retry, it should republish the events.
There are videos, articles, and a sample to go along with it.
I come across many blog that say using rabbitmq improve the performance of microservices due to asynchronous nature of rabbitmq.
I don't understand in that case how the the http response is send to end user I am elaborating my question below more clearly.
user send a http request to microservice1(which is user facing service)
microservice1 send it to rabbitmq because it need some service from microservice2
microservice2 receive the request process it and send the response to rabbitmq
microservice1 receive the response from rabbitmq
NOW how this response is send to browser?
Does microservice1 waits untill it receive the response from rabbitmq?
If yes then how it become aynchronous??
It's a good question. To answer, you have to imagine the server running one thread at a time. Making a request to a microservice via RestTemplate is a blocking request. The user clicks a button on the web page, which triggers your spring-boot method in microservice1. In that method, you make a request to microservice2, and the microservice1 does a blocking wait for the response.
That thread is busy waiting for microservice2 to complete the request. Threads are not expensive, but on a very busy server, they can be a limiting factor.
RabbitMQ allows microservice1 to queue up a message to microservice2, and then release the thread. Your receive message will be trigger by the system (spring-boot / RabbitMQ) when microservice2 processes the message and provides a response. That thread in the thread pool can be used to process other users' requests in the meantime. When the RabbitMQ response comes, the thread pool uses an unused thread to process the remainder of the request.
Effectively, you're making the server running microservice1 have more threads available more of the time. It only becomes a problem when the server is under heavy load.
Good question , lets discuss one by one
Synchronous behavior:
Client send HTTP or any request and waits for the response HTTP.
Asynchronous behavior:
Client sends the request, There's another thread that is waiting on the socket for the response. Once response arrives, the original sender is notified (usually, using a callback like structure).
Now we can talk about blocking vs nonblocking call
When you are using spring rest then each call will initiate new thread and waiting for response and block your network , while nonblocking call all call going via single thread and pushback will return response without blocking network.
Now come to your question
Using rabbitmq improve the performance of microservices due to
asynchronous nature of rabbitmq.
No , performance is depends on your TPS hit and rabbitmq not going to improve performance .
Messaging give you two different type of messaging model
Synchronous messaging
Asynchronous messaging
Using Messaging you will get loose coupling and fault tolerance .
If your application need blocking call like response is needed else cannot move use Rest
If you can work without getting response go ahaead with non blocking
If you want to design your app loose couple go with messaging.
In short above all are architecture style how you want to architect your application , performance depends on scalability .
You can combine your app with rest and messaging and non-blocking with messaging.
In your scenario microservice 1 could be rest blocking call give call other api using rest template or web client and or messaging queue and once get response will return rest json call to your web app.
I would take another look at your architecture. In general, with microservices - especially user-facing ones that must be essentially synchronous, it's an anti-pattern to have ServiceA have to make a call to ServiceB (which may, in turn, call ServiceC and so on...) to return a response. That condition indicates those services are tightly coupled which makes them fragile. For example: if ServiceB goes down or is overloaded in your example, ServiceA also goes offline due to no fault of its own. So, probably one or more of the following should occur:
Deploy the related services behind a facade that encloses the entire domain - let the client interact synchronously with the facade and let the facade handle talking to multiple services behind the scenes.
Use MQTT or AMQP to publish data as it gets added/changed in ServiceB and have ServiceA subscribe to pick up what it needs so that it can fulfill the user request without explicitly calling another service
Consider merging ServiceA and ServiceB into a single service that can handle requests without having to make external calls
You can also send the HTTP request from the client to the service, set the application-state to waiting or similar, and have the consuming application subscribe to a eventSuccess or eventFail integration message from the bus. The main point of this idea is that you let daisy-chained services (which, again, I don't like) take their turns and whichever service "finishes" the job publishes an integration event to let anyone who's listening know. You can even do things like pass webhook URI's with the initial request to have services call the app back directly on completion (or use SignalR, or gRPC, or...)
The way we use RabbitMQ is to integrate services in real-time so that each service always has the info it needs to be responsive all by itself. To use your example, in our world ServiceB publishes events when data changes. ServiceA only cares about, and subscribes to a small subset of those events (and typically only a field or two of the event data), but it knows within seconds (usually less) when B has changed and it has all the information it needs to respond to requests. Each service literally has no idea what other services exist, it just knows events that it cares about (and that conform to a contract) arrive from time-to-time and it needs to pay attention to them.
You could also use events and make the whole flow async. In this scenario microservice1 creates an event representing the user request and then return a requested created response immediately to the user. You can then notify the user later when the request is finished processing.
I recommend the book Designing Event-Driven Systems written by Ben Stopford.
I asked a similar question to Chris Richardson (www.microservices.io). The result was:
Option 1
You use something like websockets, so the microservice1 can send the response, when it's done.
Option 2
microservice1 responds immediately (OK - request accepted). The client pulls from the server repeatedly until the state changed. Important is that microservice1 stores some state about the request (ie. initial state "accepted", so the client can show the spinner) which is modified, when you finally receive the response (ie. update state to "complete").
My application is spring boot micro service listening to a Rabbit MQ queue.
The queue receives messages from different sources.
The requirement is that when the application server is going down (this could happen because of many reasons, may be because we brought the site down, or we are deploying an updated software on to our application server) we would like the queue to process the current message. As of now, we lose the message that the queue is currently processing.
How can I achieve this?
The default shutdownTimeout is 5000ms; you can increase it.
You should not, however, lose any messages, it should be requeued (unless you are using AcknowledgeMode.NONE (which is generally a bad idea).
Let's say, I have several micro-services (REST API), the problem is, if one service is not accessible (let's call service "A" ) the data which was sending to service "A" will be saved in temporary database. And after service worked, the data will be sent again.
Question:
1. Should I create the service which pings to service "A" in every 10 seconds to know service works or not? Or is it possible to do it by task queue? Any suggestions?
Polling is a waste of bandwidth. You want to use a transactional queue.
Throw all your outbound messages in the queue, and have some other process to handle the messages.
How this will work is - after your process reads from the queue, and tries to send to the REST service:
If it works, commit the transaction (for the queue)
If it doesn't work, don't commit. Start a delay (minutes, seconds - you know best) until you read from the queue again.
You can use Circuit Breaker pattern for e.g. hystrix circuit breaker from netflix.
It is possible to open circuit-breaker base on a timeout or when service call fails or inaccessible.
There are multiple dimensions to your question. First you want to consider using an infrastructure that provides resilience and self healing. Meaning you want to deploy a cluster of containers, all containing your Service A. Now you use a load balancer or API gateway in front of your service to distribute calls/load. It will also periodically check for the health of your service. When it detects a container does not respond correctly it can kill the container and start another one. This can be provided by a container infrastructure such as kubernetes / docker swarm etc.
Now this does not protect you from losing any requests. In the event that a container malfunctions there will still be a short time between the failure and the next health check where requests may not be served. In many applications this is acceptable and the client side will just re-request and hit another (healthy container). If your application requires absolutely not losing requests you will have to cache the request in for example an API gateway and make sure it is kept until a Service has completed it (also called Circuit Breaker). An example technology would be Netflix Zuul with Hystrix. Using such a Gatekeeper with built in fault tolerance can increase the resiliency even further. As a side note - Using an API gateway can also solve issues with central authentication/authorization, routing and monitoring.
Another approach to add resilience / decouple is to use a fast streaming / message queue, such as Apache Kafka, for recording all incoming messages and have a message processor process them whenever ready. The trick then is to only mark the messages as processed when your request was served fully. This can also help in scenarios where faults can occur due to large number of requests that cannot be handled in real time by the Service (Asynchronous Decoupling with Cache).
Service "A" should fire a "ready" event when it becomes available. Just listen to that and resend your request.
Sorry, if it is a duplicate question.
I have a legacy web application which uses Queues (yes. normal Java Queue) and custom polling (every 500ms). A REST web service (/message) will be called, which will return the message if any otherwise empty string.
My need: If any message is available in Queue, in Real-Time, the client should get the message. So I can save 500ms.
Is there any advantage to moving to JMS from current approach? From this link JMS MessageConsumer's messageListener makes push or pull? it seems, MessageListener (process is asynchronous) uses polling which is no different from current approach.
If it is vendor based, how HornetQ/ActiveMQ supports MessageListener?
EDIT:
The queue is used for integration of two systems. A web app & standlone java program.
Either receive or a MessageListener will be asynchronous and will be called as soon as you receive a message.
you could control the pre-fetch size of your client.
Now, if all you need is to avoid the delay of poling every 500 ms, using a Queue system may be an overkill? It's perfect fine to use java.util.Queue (or any other subclass).
If all you need is to block until an element of a java.util.Queue is available, and you don't need distributed messaging, persistence or anything like you could simply using BlockingDequeue and your thread would unblock as soon as you have a message..
Look at this:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/BlockingDeque.html
The Async MessageListener is implemented using a push based model. In ActiveMQ the broker sends a number of messages to the client based in it's set prefetch value so that messages are ready for consumption. Whether or not this helps with your particular use case is a question you need to answer for yourself.