[rabbitmq-discuss] Claim on new ocamlmq broker...

[mfp]

Matthew Sackman-3 wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 04:01:38PM -0700, mfp wrote:
>> >> "RabbitMQ did not guarantee that persistent messages had been saved to
>> >> disk before sending the message receipt, which could lead to data
>> >> loss"
>> 
>> Does that mean that these comments by Matthew Sackman (who AFAIK works
>> for
>> LShift and is a RabbitMQ developer) no longer apply?
> 
> After the buyout of RabbitMQ, by SpringSource/VMware, I am now employed
> by VMware, and continue to work full time on RabbitMQ.
> 

I just mentioned your affiliation because it is the reason why I attached
credibility to your original message --- it was not an uninformed claim by a
random poster :-)



>> > When you publish a message with delivery mode 2 you are *not*
>> _guaranteed_
>> > that it hits disk. Publishing is an async operation and you get no
>> > confirmation that it goes to disk. The new persister does very
>> aggressive
>> > caching in order to avoid doing lots of tiny and expensive writes. As
>> > such, there will frequently be times where if you restart the broker,
>> you
>> > will lose several (maybe hundreds) of messages. 
>> 
>> Note that I'm referring to what happens in case of a hard RabbitMQ/system
>> crash. The behavior described by Matthew Sackman is consistent with what
>> I
>> observed in the tests I did before writing ocamlmq: RabbitMQ accepting
>> persistent messages at fairly high rates, with quickly growing memory
>> usage
>> and no disk activity.
> 
> The behaviour you have described is an intentional design of AMQP. Yes,
> you could decide you want to write every message to disk and fsync it,
> but if you do that then you'll have utterly atrocious performance.
> Anything less that this leaves open the possibility of data loss in the
> event of a hard system crash. How much data can be lost is, in the case
> of AMQP, left to the client to decide: they can vary the size of the
> transactions as they wish - if they can tolerate at most one message
> being lost, then they must tx.commit after every publish. This will
> likely result in an fsync per message, and performance will be very
> poor, but the fact is that it's the client who is able to make decisions
> as to the amount of data that can be lost.
> 
> Without transactions, publishing is an async activity, and whilst you
> can indicate that the message should be written to disk if it ends up in
> a durable queue, this is merely guidance
> [...]
> by writing lazily rather than eagerly, we eliminate 3 disk writes (msg
> published, msg delivered, msg acknowledged).
> 
> 

This makes perfect sense.



> I have no desire to pass comment on ocamlmq. RabbitMQ tries to solve a
> very broad category of messaging patterns and requirements. By no means
> is it perfect - for some it is too slow, whilst for others it does not
> offer enough guarantees. But AMQP does have the advantage of giving a
> great amount of flexibility to the user, which is why we believe
> RabbitMQ is a sound, general purpose solution for a very broad class of
> messaging needs. Careful use of the client libraries and the features
> made available by AMQP is frequently sufficient to satisfy most needs.
> 

I do not have anything to object to this either; we are in full agreement.
ocamlmq is just a simple task queue / IPC system I wrote to satisfy my own
requirements (which I was unable to do with RabbitMQ + its STOMP adapter)
and is by no means a general purpose messaging system like RabbitMQ.

Regards,
--
Mauricio Fernandez

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