Using System-Wide Limits

If message producers tend to overrun message consumers, messages can accumulate in the broker. The broker contains a mechanism for throttling back producers and swapping messages out of active memory under low memory conditions, but it is wise to set a hard limit on the total number of messages (and message bytes) that the broker can hold.

Control these limits by setting the imq.system.max_count and the imq.system.max_size broker properties.

For example:

imq.system.max_count=5000

The defined value above means that the broker will only hold up to 5000 undelivered and/or unacknowledged messages. If additional messages are sent, they are rejected by the broker. If a message is persistent then the clinet runtime will throw an exception when the producer tries to send the message. If the message is non-persistent, the broker silently drops the message.

When an exception is thrown in sending a message, the client should process the exception by pausing for a moment and retrying the send again. (Note that the exception will never be due to the broker’s failure to receive a message; the exception is thrown by the client runtime before the message is sent to the broker.)