I’m writing a server/client game, a typical scenario looks like this: one client (clientA) send a message to the server, there is a MessageDrivenBean in server to handle such messages. After the MDB finished its job, it sends the result message back to another client (clientB).
In my opinion I only need two queues for such communication, one for input the other for output. Creating new queue for each connection is not a good idea, right?
The Input queue is relative clear, if more clients are sending message at the same time, the messages are just waiting in the queue, while there are more MDB instances in server, that should not a big performance issue.
But on the other side I am not quite clear about the output queue, should I use a topic instead of a queue? Every client is listening the output queue, one of them gets the new message and checks the property to determine if the message is to it, if not, it rollback the transaction, the message goes back to queue and be ready for other client … It should work but must be very slow. If I use topic instead, every client gets a copy of the message, if it’s not to it, just ignores the message. It should be better, right?
I’m new about message system. Is there any suggestion about my implementation? Thanks!
To begin with, choosing JMS as a gaming platform is, well, unusual — businesses use JMS brokers for delivery reliability and transaction support. Do you really need this heavy lifiting in a game? Shouldn't you resort to your own HTTP-based protocol, for example?
That said, two queues are a standard pattern for point-to-point communication. Creating a queue for a new connection is definitely not OK — message-driven beans are attached to queues at deployment time, so you won't be able to respond to queue creation events. Besides, queues are not meant to be created and destroyed in short cycles, they're rather designed to be long-living entities. If you need to deliver a message to one precise client, have the client listen on the server response queue with a message selector set to filter only the messages intended for this client (see javax.jms.Message API).
With topics it's exactly as you noted — each connected client will get a copy of the message — so again, it's not a good pattern to send to n clients a message that has to be discarded by n-1 clients.
MaDa;
You could stick one output queue (or topic) and simply tag the message with a header that identifies the intended client. Then, clients can listen on the queue/topic using a selector. Hopefully your JMS implementation has efficient server-side listener evaluation.
Related
We are migrating from Tibco to start using ActiveMQ Artemis. There are several ack settings that are available on Tibco, but we haven't found anything that's simply similar to this in Artemis. We are using the amqpnetlite .NET library to interface with Artemis, and as part of our code using DistributionMode to either move or copy based on the boolean value we are assigning to a configuration flag that we are calling as UseAutoAcknowledge. I haven't found much documentation about DistributionMode but for one that isn't very clear here - http://docs.oasis-open.org/amqp/core/v1.0/amqp-core-messaging-v1.0.html.
My question is if DistributionMode is set to move - does Artemis send an acknowledgement to the client and doesn't when it is set to copy?
I can't talk to Tibco but I can try to explain AMQP DistributionMode. Essentially the DistributionMode is a setting as to the behaviour of the receiver - a receiver with a move mode is expecting the messages to be sent only to it, not to other receivers - this is the normal behaviour of a consumer on a queue. A receiver with a copy mode is expecting other receivers to also receive the message (like a queue browser, or - sort of - like a subscriber to a topic). In a traditional Client-Broker topology, the DistributionMode is only really interesting when receiving messages from the Broker, and is unlikely to have effect when sending messages to the Broker.
Acknowledgement is separate from the DistributionMode. AMQP has the concept of Disposition which is similar to but not the same as Acknowledgement. Disposition is ultimately the action that the sender will apply at the completion of the message transfer (and so interacts with DistributionMode for messages sent by the Broker). Conceptually for each message transfer a Broker might decide that the transfer has completed successfully; that it has failed - but in a way that retrying might succeed; that it has failed in a way that will not succeed on retry; or some other more subtle outcome. Here the behaviour at the Broker is probably different depending upon whether the DistributionMode was move or copy (the specification left this vague to allow flexibility in implementations). If the receiver is asking for messages to be moved, and it declares that the transfer was unsuccessful, a broker is likely to make that message available for all competing consumers. If the receiver was asking for copy, then it never held an exclusive lock on the message, and so the choice is only whether to retry sending the copy to that same consumer.
Perhaps the simplest thing here is if you can describe the behaviour that you desire, and experts on Apache Artemis can weigh in on if/how that can be achieved.
Is it possible to keep a history of messages (with message content would be perfect) that have already been retrieved and are no longer on a queue?
In the application I can see when the sender attempts to put the message in the queue and when the receiver attempts to pick the messages up, but I'd like to see when the message really arrived into the queue and when the messages were really received.
Does MQ Explorer have this function? How would I use it?
What you are looking for is a message tracking/auditing software for IBM MQ. You can find a list of what is available here.
It is possible to use an API exit to make copies of messages in a queue or to audit both PUT and GET operations.
It is also possible to put messages to a topic, then create as many administrative subscriptions to destination queues as required. Something can then GET and log messages from one of those destination queues. The problem with this is that MQ changes the message ID between publication and consumption whereas in a queue it remains static.
There is no native MQ function to capture messages. It's possible to use linear logs and later scrape the logs but these do not necessarily capture all messages due to optimization. (A message PUT to a waiting getter outside of syncpoint for example.) However there is at least one commercial product to scrape linear transaction logs to audit message activity.
The philosophy of MQ in general is that it is the delivery mechanism and deals with envelope data to route and deliver but does not deal with payload data. WAS, IIB and other broker/transformation engines are where IBM has put all of the functions that deal with message payloads.
I'm designing a quite complicated system and was wondering what the best way is to put a jms consumer (activemq, vm protocol, non persitent) inside a netty handler.
Let me explain, i have several clients connecting to my netty server using websockets. For every client connection i create a jms consumer that listens for interesting messages on one or more topics. If a interesting message arrives i need to do a extra step (additional filtering) before sending the message to the client using the websocket.
Is the following a good way to do this:
inside a SimpleChannelInboundHandler i declare a private non static consumer
the consumer is initialized in channelActive
the consumer is destroyed in channelInactive
when a message is received by consumer i do the extra filter a send it using ctx.channel().write()
In this setup i'm a bit worried that the consumer might turn into slow consumer and slow everything down, cause the websocket goes over the internet.
I came up with a more complex one to decouple the "receiving of message by consumer" and "sending of message through a websocket".
inside a SimpleChannelInboundHandler i declare a private non static consumer
the consumer is initialized in channelActive
the consumer is destroyed in channelInactive
when a message is received by consumer i put it in a blockedqueue
every minute i let a thread (created for every client) look in the queue and send the found messages to the client using ctx.channel().write().
At this point i'm a bit worried about the extra thread per client.
Or is there maybe a better way to accomplish this task?
This is a classic slow consumer problem and the first step to resolving it is to determine what the appropriate action is when a slow consumer is detected. If it is acceptable that the slow consumer misses messages then the solution is some variation on dropping messages or unsubscribing them from the feed. For example, if it's acceptable that the client misses messages then, when one is received from JMS, check if the channel is writable. If it isn't, drop the message. If you want to give yourself a bit more of a buffer (although OS buffers are quite large) you can track the number of write completion future's that haven't completed (ie the messages haven't been written to the OS send buffer) and drop messages if there are too many outstanding write requests.
If the client may not miss messages, and is consistently slow, then the problem is more difficult. One option might be to divert messages to a JMS queue with a specific header value, then open a new consumer that reads messages from that queue using a JMS selector. This will put more load on the JMS server but might be appropriate for temporary slowness and hopefully it won't interfere with you main topic feeds. Alternatively you might want to stash the messages in a different store, such as a database, so you can poll for messages when they can be sent. If you do this right a single polling thread can cope with many clients (query for clients which have outstanding messages, then for each client, load a bunch of messages). However this isn't as convenient as using JMS.
I wouldn't go with option 2 because the blocking queue is only going to solve the problem temporarily, and you can achieve the same thing by tracking how many write operations are waiting to complete.
I'm just starting understanding and trying ZeroMQ.
It's not clear to me how could I have a two way communication between more than two actors (publisher and subscriber) so that each component is able both to read and write on the MQ.
This would allow to create event-driven architecture, because each component could be listening for an event and reply with another event.
Is there a way to do this with ZeroMQ directly or I should implement my own solution on top of that?
If you want simple two-way communication then you simply set up a publishing socket on each node, and let each connect to the other.
In an many to many setup this quickly becomes tricky to handle. Basically, it sounds like you want some kind of central node that all nodes can "connect" to, receive messages from and, if some conditions on the subscriber are met, send messages to.
Since ZeroMq is a simple "power-socket", and not a message queue (hence its name, ZeroMQ - Zero Message Queue) this is not feasible out-of-the-box.
A simple alternative could be to let each node set up an UDP broadcast socket (not using ZeroMq, just regular sockets). All nodes can listen in to whatever takes place and "publish" its own messages back on the socket, effectively sending it to any nodes listening. This setup works on a LAN and in a setting where it is ok for messages to get lost (like periodical state updates). If the messages needs to be reliable (and possibly durable) you need a more advanced full-blown message queue.
If you can do without durable message queues, you can create a solution based on a central node, a central message handler, to which all nodes can subscribe to and send data to. Basically, create a "server" with one REP (Response) socket (for incoming data) and one PUB (Publisher) socket (for outgoing data). Each client then publishes data to the servers REP socket over a REQ (Request) socket and sets up a SUB (Subscriber) socket to the servers PUB socket.
Check out the ZeroMq guide regarding the various message patterns available.
To spice it up a bit, you could add event "topics", including server side filtering, by splitting up the outgoing messages (on the servers PUB socket) into two message parts (see multi-part messages) where the first part specifies the "topic" and the second part contains the payload (e.g. temp|46.2, speed|134). This way, each client can register its interest in any topic (or all) and let the server filter out only matching messages. See this example for details.
Basically, ZeroMq is "just" an abstraction over regular sockets, providing a couple of messaging patterns to build your solution on top of. However, it relieves you of a lot of tedious work and provides scalability and performance out of the ordinary. It takes some getting used to though. Check out the ZeroMq Guide for more details.
I have a basic question about, the JMS architecture. A typical arrangement can be point-to-point, were message from customers are interleaved. that means that concurrent communication is not supported right?
now in publish and subscribe we can have lots of customers registered in one or more topics, and each time a message is sent all the registered customers receive the message right?
(i guess it is done by using multicast right?)
if i wanted to implement JMS for sending queries to a database, and receive responses from the database, then the publish and subscribe method should be used right? I can't do it with point - to - point, if i have multiple client right?
You can do it with point to point, you just probably wouldn't want to.
For database interactions, you probably want a data grid, not a message queue - and you can use temporary queues if you really are desperate to fit JMS into the architecture.
I guess I have a question for you: what exactly are you trying to accomplish?