[rabbitmq-discuss] does rabbitmq server close connections?

[Alexandru Scvorţov]

> We've been bitten by this with firewalls that close connections after idle
> timeouts. Best solution I can come up with is to use TCP keepalives.

Enabling heartbeats (when connecting with a client) didn't help?
(heartbeats are the AMQP equivalent of TCP keep-alives)

> If you client supports setting TCP options during the connection, that's
> all you need to do for the client side part. For the server side, I
> couldn't find any options for this in the rabbit config, so we implemented
> libkeepalive to force the server to use keepalives.
> 
> Rabbit folks, please add this as an option to the server.

I haven't tried, but I think you can enable keepalives in the
rabbitmq.config.  Just add a tcp_listen_options entry with {keepalive,
true}:

[
        {rabbit, [{tcp_listen_options, [{keepalive, true}]}]}
].

http://www.rabbitmq.com/configure.html#config-items

Wouldn't something like that work?

Cheers,
Alex

On Tue, Jan 03, 2012 at 10:47:43AM -0500, Mark Steele wrote:
> We've been bitten by this with firewalls that close connections after idle
> timeouts. Best solution I can come up with is to use TCP keepalives.
> 
> If you client supports setting TCP options during the connection, that's
> all you need to do for the client side part. For the server side, I
> couldn't find any options for this in the rabbit config, so we implemented
> libkeepalive to force the server to use keepalives.
> 
> Rabbit folks, please add this as an option to the server.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Mark Steele, CISSP, CSM
> Bering Media Inc.
> 
> On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 9:41 AM, Alexandru Scvorţov
> <alexandru at rabbitmq.com>wrote:
> 
> > > With 100's of computers connected to rabbitmq with persistent
> > connections,
> > > would this pose any problems?
> >
> > Not unless you run out of free file handles.  On normal installations,
> > it should handle up to thousands of connections without difficulty.  You
> > could further configure it to support more connections.
> >
> > > Does it time-out by default?
> >
> > No.  Connections are not timed out.
> >
> > > Why use a heartbeat?  Is it to re-establish if the heartbeat fails?
> >
> > If the network fails between a client and the broker, and there's no
> > traffic between them at that point, both will think the connection is
> > still open, even though it isn't.  Heartbeats ensure that both broker
> > and client are notified fairly quickly if the connection fails.
> >
> > > Would it be better for clients to close connections and only open a
> > > connection when necessary?
> >
> > It depends on your use case.
> >
> > > For reading messages we need persistent connections.
> > > But for writing, and I can see how we could potentially only open a
> > > connection to write a message when required.
> >
> > For consuming messages *efficiently*, you need persistent connections.
> > If you only get messages very rarely, you could open a connection, poll
> > the broker with basic.get and then close the connection.  But, if you
> > need to consume a lot of messages, you probably want persistent
> > connections anyway.
> >
> > Hope this helps.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Alex
> >
> > On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 05:21:26PM -0500, S Ahmed wrote:
> > > With 100's of computers connected to rabbitmq with persistent
> > connections,
> > > would this pose any problems?
> > >
> > > Does it time-out by default?
> > >
> > > Why use a heartbeat?  Is it to re-establish if the heartbeat fails?
> > >
> > > Would it be better for clients to close connections and only open a
> > > connection when necessary?
> > >
> > > For reading messages we need persistent connections.
> > >
> > > But for writing, and I can see how we could potentially only open a
> > > connection to write a message when required.
> >
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> >
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