[rabbitmq-discuss] rabbitmq-discuss Digest, Vol 18, Issue 34

Mon Nov 17 23:13:04 GMT 2008

Ilya Grigorik wrote:
> I've setup a 
> simple consumer which pushes ~10kb/s into a Rabbit queue,

Presumably you mean a *producer*. Is that producer publishing the 
messages as fast as it can, or is it rate-limited?

And how did you measure the rate?

> the memory appears to be fluctuating all over the map.

Large fluctuations in memory are nothing unusual in most 
garbage-collected languages.

> Also, I've added a liberal swap partition to the box, but I'm still 
> seeing same behavior as before: rabbit died at around 2.2GB in the 
> perister.log.

If the producer isn't rate-limited then message backlogs can build up in 
various places throughout the system, before they ever get to the 
persister. Furthermore, unless you use transactions, messages are 
persisted asynchronously. So consequently you may have many more 
messages in memory than have been written to disk.

Matthias.