[rabbitmq-discuss] RabbitMQ queue out-rate settles to in-rate when many messages in queue

Mon May 12 11:26:37 BST 2014

Hi all,

RabbitMQ: 3.3.1
Erlang: 17

We have following situation:

   - A queue contains a large amount of messages (5 million because the 
   consumers are shutdown)
   - There's a constant  incoming message flow at a rate of ~2000 msg/s.
   - Messages are persistent though diskIO is far from being saturated.
   - Consumers have a prefetch value of 1000
   - We presume backpressure is applied to the producer in this situation 
   (difficult to observe).

What we observe is that out-rate settles to the in-rate, which I don't 
understand because:

   - There a large amount of messages in the queue so plenty to consume.
   - We KNOW consumers are able to write at a much higher throughput even 
   after bumping prefetch value.
   - When the queue is empty, in & outgoing rate is again 8000 msg/s

Any tips, leads why the consumption rate settles to the incoming rate in 
this situation?

cheers,

Jelle

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