Memory Management: Increasing Broker Stability Under Load

Memory management can be configured on a destination-by-destination basis or on a systemwide level (for all destinations, collectively).

Using Physical Destination Limits

For information on physical destination limits, see Chapter 6, Managing Physical Destinations

Using Systemwide 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 in 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/unacknowledged messages. If additional messages are sent, they are rejected by the broker. If a message is persistent then the producer will get an exception when it tries to send the message. If the message is nonpersistent, the broker silently drops the message.

When an exception is returned in sending a message, the client should pause for a moment and retry the send again. (Note that the exception will never be due to the broker’s failure to receive a message; the only exceptions raised are those detected by the client on the sending side.)