[rabbitmq-discuss] Protection against slow consumers

Mon Nov 1 12:22:44 GMT 2010

Hello together

I'm looking for a way how to protect against slow consumers.

We are publishing messages to a topic exchange as part of a public  
interface. The subscribers are applications developed by our clients  
(outside of our control).

Our concern is that one slow consumer could potentially force the  
broker to throttle our publisher, affecting all other consumers.

We encourage the consumers to use a small prefetch buffer, but have no  
way how to enforce this. In general, we cannot assume that all  
consumers cooperate.

For instance, a client that is consuming but not acking will (I  
believe) impact the broker memory consumption.

Your ideas are welcome.

Cheers
Jiri Krutil
Deutsche Boerse Systems AG