Scheduling a MDB - jms

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.

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 .

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

IBM Websphere MQ Session Lifetime

What are the best practices regarding sessions in an application that is designed to fetch messages from a MQ server every 5 seconds?
Should I keep one session open for the whole time (could be weeks or longer), or better open a session, fetch the messages, and then close the session again?
I am using the .net IBM XMS v8 client library.
Adding to what #Attila Repasi's response, I would go for a consumer with message listener attached. The message listener would get called whenever a message needs to be delivered to application. This avoids application explicitly calling receive() to retrieve messages from queue and waste CPU cycles if there are no messages on the queue.
Check the XMS.NET best practices
Keep the connection and session open for a longer period if your application sends or receive message continuously. Creation of connection or session is a time consuming operation and consumes lot of resources and involves network flow (for client connections).
I'm not sure what you are calling a session, but typically applications connect to the queue manager serving them once at start, and keep that connection up while running.
I don't see a reason to disconnect just to reconnect 5 seconds later.
As for keeping the queues open, it depends on your environment.
If there are no special circumstances, I would keep the queue open.
I think the most worth thinking about is how you issue the GETs to read the messages.

IBM MQ Message Throttling

We are using IBM MQ and we are facing some serious problems regarding controlling its asynchronous delivery to its recipient.We are having some java listeners configured, now the problem is that we need to control the messages coming towards listener, because the messages coming to server are in millions count and server machine dont have that much capacity t process so many threads at a time, so is there any way like throttling on IBM MQ side where we can configure preetch limit like Apache MQ does?
or is there any other way to achieve this?
Currently we are closing connection with IBM MQ when some X limit has reached on listener, but doesen't seems to be efficient way.
Please guys help us out to solve this issue.
Generally with message queueing technologies like MQ the point of the queue is that the sender is decoupled from the receiver. If you're having trouble with message volumes then the answer is to let them queue up on the receiver queue and process them as best you can, not to throttle the sender.
The obvious answer is to limit the maximum number of threads that your listeners are allowed to take up. I'm assuming you're using some sort of MQ threadpool? What platform are you using that provides unlimited listener threads?
From your description, it almost sounds like you have some process running that - as soon as it detects a message in the queue - it reads the message, starts up a new thread and goes back and looks at the queue again. This is the WRONG approach.
You should have a defined number of process threads running (start with one and scale up as required, and within limits of your server) which read from the queue themselves. They would each open the queue in shared mode and either get-with-wait or do immediate get with a sleep if you get a MQRC 2033 (no messages in queue).
Hope that helps.
If you are running in the application server environment, then the maxPoolDepth property on the activationSpec will define the maximum ServerSessionPool size for the MDB - decreasing this will throttle the number messages being delivered concurrently.
Of course, if your MDB (or javax.jms.MessageListener in the JSE environment) does nothing but hand the message to something else (or, worse, just spawn an unmanaged Thread and start it) onMessage will spin rapidly and you can still encounter problems. So in that case you need to limit other resources too, e.g. via threadpool configuration.
Closing the connection to the QM is never an efficient way, as the MQCONN/MQDISC cycle is expensive.

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