[rabbitmq-discuss] When is persister.log.previous made?

Mon Oct 19 13:31:43 BST 2009

Tsuraan,

tsuraan wrote:
> One of our systems overfed the rabbit, and it's now a bit angry.  The
> strange problem that we're having, though, is that it seems that the
> commit after the thousandth ack'd message is triggering the persister
> log rollover, which is then causing beam to run out of memory.  The
> only thing we're doing is basic_get'ing messages, acking them, and
> then committing (the channel is transactional).  We've also tried
> committing every thousand messages; either way, the first commit after
> the thousandth ack'd message is causing the persister log rollover,
> followed immediately by beam crashing due to being out of RAM.

The logic for when the persister log is rolled over is quite complex,
involving both time-based and message-count based heuristics.

As an aside, why are you using transactions on the consuming side? I
have yet to come across a use case where that is genuinely required.

> Does anybody know why rolling the persister log would cause the system
> to run out of memory?  It seems like a strange place to need to
> allocate a lot of RAM

When rolling the persister log, rabbit writes a snapshot of all
currently persisted messages, and it needs to allocate memory for that
entire snapshot.

> Also, will the future (1.8?) persister still do the process described
> in https://dev.rabbitmq.com/wiki/RabbitPersisterDesign ?

No.

> Writing the entire rabbit state to disk every so-often doesn't seem 
> like it would work terribly well when storing huge amounts of data

Indeed.

Regards,

Matthias.