[rabbitmq-discuss] General questions about HA, Stability/Reliability and Broker Administration

[Dave Greggory]

> Depends what you mean by broker administration. RabbitMQ provides everything you need in theory out of the box: use rabbitmqctl for user / vhost / permission administration and get your applications to declare all the AMQPish resources they need.

You're right, rabbitmqctl pretty much provides almost everything you need. Only thing I wish it had that BQL has is the ability to:
1. purge or empty queues 
2. Declare exchanges / queues / bindings
3. Export / import routing tables (for restoring a cluster that suffered irrecoverable failure)

One thing I like about RabbitMQ as opposed to most other brokers is that all these functionality is provided as plugins instead of being tightly integrated into the broker itself. That's why I'd prefer to not have to run BQL or Status or any other plugins and keep the broker clean and as simple as possible. 

Since we're not using the new persister yet (we'll switch when it's officially released), I'd like to monitor the overall memory usage. Is it possible to that using rabbitmqctl? List_queues only show memory per queue. Where does the Status plugin get it's total memory usage details from?

Thanks Simon. 

- Dave