[rabbitmq-discuss] The mechanics of message exchange between the broker and consumer

Thu Feb 7 22:14:01 GMT 2013

I am curious as to the exact mechanics of message exchange between the 
broker and the consumer.

1. Consumer opens a TCP connection to the broker.
2. Consumers subscribes to receive some messages from the broker - by 
binding the topic binding keys to the channel on a named queue.
3. Now whenever the broker gets some messages (from some producers) posted 
to that queue with a routing key matching any of the topic binding keys 
above, it will send the message to the subscribed consumer.

What are the exact underlying mechanics of step 3? Does the broker just use 
the TCP connection opened in step 1 and Push messages whenever it gets them 
OR does the consumer client library do a tight polling ("Hey broker get me 
messages if you have any") with the broker under the covers even though to 
the ultimate consumer it appears to be an asynchronous callback based 
mechanism?

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