IBM MQ Message Throttling - ibm-mq

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.

Related

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.

Two consumers on same Websphere MQ JMS Queue, both receiving same message

I am working with someone who is trying to achieve a load-balancing behavior using JMS Queues with IBM Websphere MQ. As such, they have multiple Camel JMS consumers configured to read from the same Queue. Despite that this behavior is undefined according to the JMS spec (last time I looked anyway), they expect a sort of round-robin / load-balancing behavior. And, while the spec leaves this undefined, I'm led to believe that the normal behavior of Websphere MQ is to deliver the message to only one of the consumers, and that it may do some type of load-balancing. See here, for example: When multi MessageConsumer connect to same queue(Websphere MQ),how to load balance message-consumer?
But in this particular case, it appears that both consumers are receiving the same message.
Can anyone who is more of an expert with Websphere MQ shed any light on this? Is there any situation where this behavior is expected? Is there any configuration change that can alleviate this?
I'm leaning towards telling everyone here to use the native Websphere MQ clustering facility and go away from having multiple consumers pointing at the same Queue, but that will be a big change for them, so I'd love to discover a way to make this work.
Not that I'm a fan of relying on anything that's undefined, but if they're willing to rely on IBM specific behavior, I'll leave that up to them.
The only way for them to both receive the same messages are:
There are multiple copies of the message.
The apps are browsing the message without a lock, then circling back to delete it.
The apps are backing out a transaction and making the message available again.
The connection is severed before the app acknowledges the message.
Having multiple apps compete for messages in a queue is a recommended practice. If one app goes down the queue is still served. In a cluster this is crucial because the cluster will continue to direct messages to the un-served queue instance until it fills up.
If it's a Dev system, install SupportPac MA0W and tell it to trace just that one queue and you will be able to see exactly what is happening.
See the JMS spec in section 4.4. The provider must never deliver a second copy of an acknowledged message. Exception is made for session handling in 4.4.13 which I cover in #4 above. That's pretty unambiguous and part of the official spec so not an IBM-specific behavior.

Scheduling a MDB

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.

Clear messages from mq using java

What is the best approach to connect to websphere mq v7.1 and clear all the messages of one or more specified queues using Java and JMS? Do I need to use Websphere MQ specific java API? Thanks.
Like all good questions, "it depends."
The queue can be cleared with a command only if there are no open handles on the queue. In that case sending a PCF command to clear the queue is quite effective, but if there are open handles you get back an error. PCF commands are of course a Java feature and not JMS because they are proprietary to WebSphere MQ.
On the other hand, any program authorized to perform destructive gets off a queue can clear the queue. In this case, just loop over a get until you get the 2033 return code indicating the queue is empty. This can be performed using JMS or Java but both of these manage the input buffer for you. If the queue is REALLY deep then you end up moving all that data and if the app is client connected, you are moving it at network speed instead of in memory.
To get around this, you need to specify a minimal amount of buffer and as one of the GET options also specify MQGMO.TRUNCATED_MSG_ACCEPTED. This moves only the message header during the get calls and can be significantly faster.
Finally, if you are doing this programamtically and regardless of which method you use, spin off several threads and don't use syncpoint. You actually have to go out of your way to get exclusive input on a queue so once you get a session, just spawn many threads off of it. Close each thread gracefully and shut down the the session once all the threads are closed.

JMS Messages not consumed till producer connection close :-(

I am relatively new to JMS and have encountered a weird problem implementing my first real application. I'm desporate for any help or advice.
Background: I use AtiveMQ (java) as the message broker with non-transacted, non-persitent queues.
The Design: I have a straight forward producer/consumer system based around a single queue. A number of nodes(currently 2) place messages onto/ consume from the queue. Selectors are used to filter which messages a node recieves.
The Problem: The producer succesfully places its items on to the queue (i have verified they are there using the web interface) however the consumers remain blocked and do not read them. Only when i close the JMS connection in the producer do the consumers jump into life and consume the messages as expected.
This bevaior seems very weird to me, surely you shouldnt have to completely hang up the producer connection for the consumers to be able to read from the queue. I must have made a mistake somewhere(possibly with sessions) but the at the moment the number of things that could be wrong is to large and i have no idea what would cause this behaviour.
Any hints as to a solution, the cause of the problem or just how to continue debugging would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your time,
P.S If you requrie any additional information i am happy to provide it
Hard to say without seeing the code, but it sounds like the producer is transacted. You should not have to close the producer in order for the consumers to receive a message but a transacted producer won't send it messages until you call commit. Other things to check is that the connection has been started. Also if you have many consumers you should look at the prefetch setting to ensure that one consumer doesn't hog all the messages, setting to prefetch of 1 might be needed, but hard to say without further insight into your use case.

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