Managing Memory

Destinations can consume significant resources, depending on the number and size of messages they handle and on the number and durability of the consumers that register; therefore, they need to be managed closely to guarantee good messaging service performance and reliability.

You can set properties to prevent a broker from being overwhelmed by incoming messages and to prevent the broker from running out of memory. The broker uses three levels of memory protection to keep the message service operating as resources become scarce: destination limits, system-wide limits, and system memory thresholds. Ideally, if destination limits and system-wide limits are set appropriately, critical system-memory thresholds should never be breached.

Destination Message Limits

You can set destination properties to manage memory and message flow for each destination. For example, you can specify the maximum number of producers allowed for a destination, the maximum number (or size) of messages allowed in a destination, and the maximum size of any single message.

You can also specify how the broker should respond when any such limits are reached: to slow producers, to throw out the oldest messages, to throw out the lowest-priority messages, or to reject the newest messages.

System-Wide Message Limits

You can also use properties to set limits that apply to all destinations on a broker: you can specify the total number of messages and the memory consumed by all messages. If any of the system-wide message limits are reached, the broker rejects new messages.

System Memory Thresholds

Finally, you can use properties to set thresholds at which the broker takes increasingly serious action to prevent memory overload. The action taken depends on the state of memory resources: green (plenty of memory is available), yellow (broker memory is running low), orange (broker is low on memory), red (broker is out of memory). As the broker’s memory state progresses from green to red, the broker takes increasingly serious actions:

• It throws out in-memory copies of persistent messages in the data store.

• It throttles back producers of non-persistent messages, eventually stopping the flow of messages into the broker. Persistent message flow is automatically limited by the requirement that each message be acknowledged by the broker.