[rabbitmq-discuss] Is RabbitMQ indeed "hype ware"?

Sat Aug 29 15:20:16 BST 2009

Hello,

I am in the process of setting up messaging middleware for a webbased platform which should be able to handle millions producers/consumers.

We've started our development with ActiveMQ. Everything seemed to work fine until we started connecting with 1000 consumers to a single topic. ActiveMQ could not handle this at all, complaining about "too many open filehandles". Others seem to have encountered this same issue as well (see second life's review), but we've not been able to google a solution. That was a major showstopper, and made us conclude that something was terribly wrong with the architecture of this software, which made it unsuitable for our intended purpose.

We then turned to RabbitMQ, and after fixing the Perl and ActionScript AMQP interfaces (http://github.com/joodie) we now almost have a working prototype for our environment, ready for some first performance tests.

Now I just received a mail from the ActiveMQ/Fuse support team, which in reply to my report to them about the 1000 consumers issue, quotes their "Manager Engineering", stating the following:

============== START OF QUOTE =================
This is due to the configuration out of the box for ActiveMQ - its very
straightforward for ActiveMQ to handle the same load as RabbitMQ.
There are some significant benefits in using ActiveMQ over RabbitMQ.
ActiveMQ has no limit on the depth (number of messages) in a Queue -
other than disk space. RabbitMQ runs out of memory.
Also - there's performance benefits too - although sending messages can
be a lot faster to RabbitMQ (this is due to RabbitMQ caching messages in
memory) - consuming messages is considerably slower.
In reality, RabbitMQ is just hype ware - not really suitable for
production scenarios. Although its getting a lot of traction, it only
suitable for cases where consumers will always keep up with producers.
=============== END OF QUOTE ======================

Now that's a pretty scary assesment there. "Hype ware"... Perhaps RabbitMQ's engineers can reply to this, and reassure us that our shift in favour of RabbitMQ is a sound decision? (we plan to deploy it on systems with plenty gigs of RAM).

Kind regards, Roberto
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