Acknowledgement Mode

Other than using transactions, you can ensure reliable delivery by having the client acknowledge receiving a message. If a session is closed without the client acknowledging the message or if the message server fails before the acknowledgment is processed, the broker redelivers that message, setting the MQ_REDELIVERED_HEADER_PROPERTY message header.

For a non-transacted session, the client can choose one of three acknowledgement modes, each of which has its own performance characteristics:

• AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE. The system automatically acknowledges a message once the consumer has processed it. This mode guarantees at most one redelivered message after a provider failure.

• CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE. The application controls the point at which messages are acknowledged. All messages that have been received in the same session up to the message where the acknowledge function is called upon are acknowledged. If the message server fails while processing a set of acknowledgments, one or more messages in that group might be redelivered.

  Note that this behavior models the JMS 1.0.2 specification rather than the JMS 1.1 specification

  (Using CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE mode is similar to using transactions, except there is no guarantee that all acknowledgments will be processed together if a provider fails during processing.)

• DUPS_OK_ACKNOWLEDGE. This mode instructs the system to acknowledge messages in a lazy manner. Multiple messages can be redelivered after a provider failure.

Performance is impacted by acknowledgement mode for the following reasons:

• Extra control messages between broker and client are required in AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE and CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE modes. The additional control messages add processing overhead and can interfere with JMS payload messages, causing processing delays.

• In AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE and CLIENT_ACKNOWLEDGE modes, the client must wait until the broker confirms that it has processed the client’s acknowledgment before the client can consume more messages. (This broker confirmation guarantees that the broker will not inadvertently redeliver these messages.)

• The Message Queue persistent store must be updated with the acknowledgement information for all persistent messages received by consumers, thereby decreasing performance.

In general, our tests show about a 7% difference in performance between pesistent and nonpersistent messages, no matter which acknowledgment mode is used. That is, while persistence is a significant factor affecting performance, acknowledgment mode is not.