[rabbitmq-discuss] mysterious rabbit crash

Tue May 19 18:28:12 BST 2009

Dmitriy,

Tony Garnock-Jones wrote:
> Dmitriy Samovskiy wrote:
>> Which makes me wonder why rabbit was using  so much memory if its
>> queues were being drained normally...
> Indeed. If you still have the persister log around somewhere, it might
> be worth feeding it to a rabbit and using rabbitmqctl to get a picture
> of the states of the queues implied by the file?

The difference between

> -rw-r--r--    1 rabbitmq rabbitmq 22722770 May 19 00:27 rabbit_persister.LOG.previous

and

> binary: 815315560

Suggests that the bulk of the memory is consumed by transient messages, 
and that it just happened to be a persister log rollover that triggered 
the OOM condition.

What client are you using to publish the messages? Does it react to 
channel.flow messages from the server telling it to throttle?

Also, are you sure the consumers were draining all the queues and 
ack'ing messages properly?

You could set up some monitoring that periodically calls 'rabbitmqctl 
list_queues ...' to catch any queues not getting drained.

Regards,

Matthias.