So we added support for federated queues in RabbitMQ 3.2.0. This blog post explains what they're for and how to use them.

RabbitMQ is a very extensible message broker, allowing users to extend the server's functionality by writing plugins. Many of the broker features are even shipped as plugins that come by default with the broker installation: the Management Plugin, or STOMP support, to name just a couple. While that's pretty cool, the fact that plugins must be written in Erlang is sometimes a challenge. I decided to see if it was possible to write plugins in another language that targeted the Erlang Virtual Machine (EVM), and in this post I'll share my progress.

Charts​

So we've talked about how RabbitMQ 3.0 can break things, but that's not very positive. Let's have a look at some of the new features! Just some of them - quite a lot changed in 3.0, and we don't have all day...

RabbitMQ includes a bunch of cool new features. But in order to implement some of them we needed to change some things. So in this blog post I'm going to list some of those things in case you need to do anything about them.

I've written a plugin for RabbitMQ that adds support for the MQTT 3.1 protocol. MQ Telemetry Transport is a light-weight PUB/SUB protocol designed for resource-constrained devices and limited bandwidth situations, making it ideally suited to sensors and mobile devices. The implementation is a protocol adapter plugin, allowing MQTT clients to connect to a RabbitMQ broker simultaneously with clients implementing other protocols. We encourage projects that demand the combination of a low-overhead protocol on a robust, scalable broker with high reliability and enterprise features to consider this option.

Here at Rabbit HQ we've been enjoying "RabbitMQ in Action", the introduction to RabbitMQ and messaging.  Part of the Manning series, the book is written by Jason Williams and Alvaro Videla, both well known for their many contributions to the Rabbit community.

Today we'd like to say thank-you to Jason and Alvaro.  Thank-you Jason and Alvaro!  You did an amazing job and infinite beers are on us.

But there's more...  Manning have kindly offered a promotional discount of 37% to readers of this blog.  All is revealed below, in a guest post by Jason Williams himself...

For quite a while here, at RabbitMQ headquarters, we were struggling to find a good way to expose messaging in a web browser. In the past we tried many things ranging from the old-and-famous JsonRPC plugin (which basically exposes AMQP via AJAX), to Rabbit-Socks (an attempt to create a generic protocol hub), to the management plugin (which can be used for basic things like sending and receiving messages from the browser).

Over time we've learned that the messaging on the web is very different to what we're used to. None of our attempts really addressed that, and it is likely that messaging on the web will not be a fully solved problem for some time yet.

That said, there is a simple thing RabbitMQ users keep on asking about, and although not perfect, it's far from the worst way do messaging in the browser: exposing STOMP through Websockets.

You have a queue in Rabbit. You have some clients consuming from that queue. If you don't set a QoS setting at all (basic.qos), then Rabbit will push all the queue's messages to the clients as fast as the network and the clients will allow. The consumers will balloon in memory as they buffer all the messages in their own RAM. The queue may appear empty if you ask Rabbit, but there may be millions of messages unacknowledged as they sit in the clients, ready for processing by the client application. If you add a new consumer, there are no messages left in the queue to be sent to the new consumer. Messages are just being buffered in the existing clients, and may be there for a long time, even if there are other consumers that become available to process such messages sooner. This is rather sub optimal.

So, the default QoS prefetch setting gives clients an unlimited buffer, and that can result in poor behaviour and performance. But what should you set the QoS prefetch buffer size to? The goal is to keep the consumers saturated with work, but to minimise the client's buffer size so that more messages stay in Rabbit's queue and are thus available for new consumers or to just be sent out to consumers as they become free.

Welcome back! Last time we talked about flow control and latency; today let's talk about how different features affect the performance we see. Here are some simple scenarios. As before, they're all variations on the theme of one publisher and one consumer publishing as fast as they can.