[rabbitmq-discuss] Memory Management Concerns / Questions

[Matthias Radestock]

On 22/12/11 16:12, AndyB wrote:
> My test case is to run multiple publishers sending messages
> over and over as fast as possible while also have a single consumer
> processing those messages with a delay.  The goal is to obviously
> force messages to pile up in memory on the node to trigger the memory
> alert.  Since I have both publishers and consumers connected, I'm
> expecting to see the consumers begin to get some sort of exception
> saying that they cant submit anymore work while the consumer continues
> to process.  But what I'm actually seeing is that the publishers
> continue piling on and the consumer continues to process, but the
> machine eventually runs out of disk space and crashes.

Rabbit does not enforce any disk space limits. So if producers keep 
publishing messages, and consumers do not keep up, rabbit will page more 
and more messages to disk and eventually disk space runs out.

Limiting disk space usage, similar to the way rabbit limits ram usage, 
is on our todo list. Though in practice most systems have ample disk 
space and operational monitoring usually detects situations that fill up 
the disk with plenty of time to take remedial action.

Matthias.