[rabbitmq-discuss] Reliable way to get number of messages in a queue

Fri Oct 23 22:09:20 BST 2009

Mark,

Mark Nutter wrote:
> Ahh.. I see now. So is there a way to tell how many messages the 
> consumer currently has?

The server knows how many messages have been sent out to a consumer and 
not acknowledged yet, and you can see that count, per queue, in the 
messages_unacknowledged info item of 'rabbitmqctl list_queues'.

There is no way to get the same information via the protocol.

Regards,

Matthias.