[rabbitmq-discuss] Dead-Lettering Queue Contents On Queue Expiration

Thu Jan 16 10:56:47 GMT 2014

On 14/01/14 19:20, Alex Robson wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I would like to see messages in an expired queue published to the
> dead-letter exchange (if one has been provided) instead of having them lost.

Yes, this would be a nice feature to have.

The reason why we haven't yet implemented this (besides the usual "not 
enough time") is that our current dead-lettering implementation depends 
on the queue republishing messages, and it's not obvious that this would 
perform acceptably in the case where you dead-letter a queue that is too 
large to fit in memory.

<snip explanation of use case>

> Interested in your thoughts on this. If folks like the idea but there's
> not a great deal of bandwidth, I'd be happy to attempt an initial
> implementation via PR.

We've been thinking similar thoughts about load balancing. So there's 
definitely some interest there. If you want to send us a PR then that's 
great, but please be aware that a) you'd need to sign a contributor 
agreement and b) it might be harder than you think. But c) it might not :-)

Cheers, Simon

-- 
Simon MacMullen
RabbitMQ, Pivotal