[rabbitmq-discuss] major failure when clearing large queue backlog

Tue Aug 16 14:35:53 BST 2011

This all sounds good. We're still going to go slow on such a big
change, but we'll mull this over and probably turn it back on soon.

cheers

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 8:56 AM, Matthew Sackman <matthew at rabbitmq.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 08:45:27AM -0400, Aaron Westendorf wrote:
>> We've been running this configuration for a long time now, and I
>> vaguely recall that when the spool-to-disk feature was added, it was
>> dependent on this setting. However, I've seen it write to disk even
>> with this setting off so I may be mistaken.
>
> Yes, because whilst setting it to 0 stops the broker from throttling
> producers when memory gets tight, the queues are forced to assume that
> there is 1GB of memory available and they do continue to watch memory
> use and write to disk as they see fit. Thus if you have more than 1GB
> RAM in your machines, Rabbit will be writing to disk earlier that it
> should.
>
>> Regardless, we don't have
>> support in our applications for flow control (yet?) so I've been wary
>> to enable vm_memory_high_watermark. I plan to add a concept of flow
>> control strategies to haigha so that common use cases can be
>> abstracted without per-app implementations.
>
> Ok understood. The way Rabbit does it these days is that it just stops
> reading from the sockets of publishers. Thus the TCP buffers will fill
> up, and the publishers will just find that writing to their socket
> blocks. We don't use channel.flow any more. Thus you may find that you
> need do nothing, or, you may have a situation where you really don't
> want to have publishers blocked.
>
>> I've seen rabbit use much more than 1GB so I don't think it's defaulted to that.
>
> Well we can't control fully how much RAM gets used. That's why we hedge
> our bets and have the default at 0.4 of the installed RAM. This allows
> space for transient spikes such as GC and so forth. The point of the 1GB
> default is that this controls when Rabbit starts to send msgs to disk to
> try and free up RAM. But ultimately, it won't stop Rabbit/Erlang from
> using more than 1GB RAM if that's necessary.
>
> Matthew
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-- 
Aaron Westendorf
Senior Software Engineer
Agora Games
359 Broadway
Troy, NY 12180
Phone: 518.268.1000
aaron at agoragames.com
www.agoragames.com