[rabbitmq-discuss] In queue statistics, what does 'count' represent?

Thu Jul 1 11:57:38 BST 2010

Howard,

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 10:13, Howard Jones <howie at thingy.com> wrote:
> It seemed that with all this monitoring stuff, knowing how many messages
> were passing through the queues would be a good thing, so I installed
> rabbitmq-status-1.7.0. It shows queues and connections OK, but the
> 'Count' column never goes up. I assumed it would be a count of messages
> over all time.

In RabbitMQ "queues" can actually store messages if consumers aren't keeping
up with producers. This counter tells how many messages are stored in particular
RabbitMQ queue. If this number is rising, that could mean that your consumer
is too slow.

If this number is zero - that's perfect, you're consuming messages immediately.

I'm afraid there isn't a simple way of telling how many messages has been
forwarded through the queue. If you need this information - you should count
that in your application.

Cheers,
   Marek Majkowski