[rabbitmq-discuss] fanout exchange that does not keep messages

Mon Jul 20 17:58:41 BST 2009

Holger,

Holger Hoffstätte wrote:
> But what about when clients are half-dead, e.g. silently looping or
> whatever, without disconnecting - especially in the case of
> non-multithreaded clients like python/ruby etc.? Will the server only
> buffer until the zombie consumer is killed for good (e.g. by a watchdog)
> and then zap the backlog? Otherwise an undetected zombie can still gobble
> up memory (or soon disk). I guess in that case only auto-expiry would help.

Dealing with "half-dead" clients is tricky - how do you know/decide when
a client is dead? Message expiries (not yet implemented in RabbitMQ) do
indeed provide (one) way of addressing that.

Matthias.