[rabbitmq-discuss] RabbitMQ with WAN latencies

Tue May 17 14:28:09 BST 2011

On 17/05/2011 12:39PM, Alvaro Saurin wrote:
> I was wondering if you could help me determining if RabbitMQ is
> appropriate for some WAN scenario...
>
> I have to send control messages to 50 or 60 machines deployed around
> the world, so they can subscribe to some message types and then
> perform some actions. Maybe some machines will be grouped in small
> clusters of 4-5 machines, and some tasks can be run by any machine in
> that group, but there will also be some tasks that will be targeted
> to some specific machines. There should be a very low traffic, with
> maybe just a couple of messages per second, so I was planning to use
> a simple architecture, with one central broker.
>
> I want to keep things simple, but I'm a bit concerned about the
> effects latency could have, and I have also read that connectivity
> losses could have some negative impact. My question is, could I keep
> this simple architecture or will I need something a bit more
> complicated like rabbitmq with xmpp or shovel? I have not found many
> docs about using RabbitMQ on WANs, so maybe nobody is crazy enough
> for trying this... maybe I should not use RabbitMQ at all?  :)

If you are going for a central broker model you should be fine. The 
discussions that we've had about network partitioning and use of the 
shovel to mitigate it have all been about clustering over a WAN, which 
is not recommended. But AMQP over WAN is fine.

Obviously synchronous methods will be slow when latency is slow 
(although no worse than e.g. HTTP would be), but with low traffic like 
that you probably don't even care.

Cheers, Simon