Charts

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So we've talked about how RabbitMQ 3.0 can break things, but that's not very positive. Let's have a look at some of the new features! Just some of them - quite a lot changed in 3.0, and we don't have all day... Read the rest of this entry »

RabbitMQ includes a bunch of cool new features. But in order to implement some of them we needed to change some things. So in this blog post I'm going to list some of those things in case you need to do anything about them. Read the rest of this entry »

I've written a plugin for RabbitMQ that adds support for the MQTT 3.1 protocol. MQ Telemetry Transport is a light-weight PUB/SUB protocol designed for resource-constrained devices and limited bandwidth situations, making it ideally suited to sensors and mobile devices. The implementation is a protocol adapter  plugin, allowing MQTT clients to connect to a RabbitMQ broker simultaneously with clients implementing other protocols. We encourage projects that demand the combination of a low-overhead protocol on a robust, scalable broker with high reliability and enterprise features to consider this option. Read the rest of this entry »

Here at Rabbit HQ we've been enjoying "RabbitMQ in Action", the introduction to RabbitMQ and messaging.  Part of the Manning series, the book is written by Jason Williams and Alvaro Videla, both well known for their many contributions to the Rabbit community.

Today we'd like to say thank-you to Jason and Alvaro.  Thank-you Jason and Alvaro!  You did an amazing job and infinite beers are on us.

But there's more...  Manning have kindly offered a promotional discount of 37% to readers of this blog.  All is revealed below, in a guest post by Jason Williams himself...

RabbitMQ in Action is here

Well, it's finally here. After 18 months of writing, re-writing and updating, RabbitMQ in Action is finished and in the flesh. It's hard to believe that when we started, RabbitMQ was at version 1.8.0 and now we're at 2.8.2. So much has changed in Rabbit that required rewrites of whole sections along the way, that it feels like we're really at 5 or 6.0. It's a testament to the Rabbit team members that helped us that the book kept pace with it all. So now that it's out why should you read it (besides the 37% discount code below)?

If you feel like you want a deeper understanding than the online tutorials offer, we wrote this for you. Whether it's figuring out clustering and mirrored queues, or just getting a better understanding of messaging fabrics (queues, bindings and routing exchanges, relays and federations.), our goal was to write the book we wished had existed when we started, and that we hope will help you. From the management console and API to building real world applications and plugins, we've tried to cover everything you need to get a good foundation of Rabbit under your belt…and hopefully that you can use as a desk reference too.

Lots of example code on Github to get you started

One thing we tried to focus on was using RabbitMQ to link together different applications written in completely different languages.  That's one of the main reasons we wrote the examples in Python and PHP. However, we had two other reasons also:

1.) Python reads almost like pseudo-code and produces incredibly readable programs…which makes it an excellent teaching language. You can focus on what the example program's doing, without a lot of class declarations and boiler plate clouding up the works.

2.) There are a ton of books on messaging targeted at Java and the old-line enterprise brokers. We wanted to write something different... something that was easier to read and more accessible to people without any background in messaging. RabbitMQ in Action is very much a book for people of all languages and backgrounds. Writing in Python and PHP helped us do that (there's appendices on using Rabbit with Java and .NET too).

With that last one in mind, we’ve done something a little different than other Manning books…all of our examples are in a public repo on Github.

We did this so that if you feel like converting the examples into the language of your choice to help those like you, you can. As long as the license on your contribution is BSD, we'll merge in your pull requests and hopefully build a huge library of RabbitMQ examples that can help everyone. There are already Ruby versions of the examples merged in!

So if those aren't reasons enough to give RabbitMQ in Action a shot…how about a 37% discount just because you read this blog?

Save 37% on RabbitMQ in Action with Promotional Discount Code 12rmqb when you checkout at the Manning web site.

For quite a while here, at RabbitMQ headquarters, we were struggling to find a good way to expose messaging in a web browser. In the past we tried many things ranging from the old-and-famous JsonRPC plugin (which basically exposes AMQP via AJAX), to Rabbit-Socks (an attempt to create a generic protocol hub), to the management plugin (which can be used for basic things like sending and receiving messages from the browser).

Over time we've learned that the messaging on the web is very different to what we're used to. None of our attempts really addressed that, and it is likely that messaging on the web will not be a fully solved problem for some time yet.

That said, there is a simple thing RabbitMQ users keep on asking about, and although not perfect, it's far from the worst way do messaging in the browser: exposing STOMP through Websockets.

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You have a queue in Rabbit. You have some clients consuming from that queue. If you don't set a QoS setting at all (basic.qos), then Rabbit will push all the queue's messages to the clients as fast as the network and the clients will allow. The consumers will balloon in memory as they buffer all the messages in their own RAM. The queue may appear empty if you ask Rabbit, but there may be millions of messages unacknowledged as they sit in the clients, ready for processing by the client application. If you add a new consumer, there are no messages left in the queue to be sent to the new consumer. Messages are just being buffered in the existing clients, and may be there for a long time, even if there are other consumers that become available to process such messages sooner. This is rather sub optimal.

So, the default QoS prefetch setting gives clients an unlimited buffer, and that can result in poor behaviour and performance. But what should you set the QoS prefetch buffer size to? The goal is to keep the consumers saturated with work, but to minimise the client's buffer size so that more messages stay in Rabbit's queue and are thus available for new consumers or to just be sent out to consumers as they become free. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back! Last time we talked about flow control and latency; today let's talk about how different features affect the performance we see. Here are some simple scenarios. As before, they're all variations on the theme of one publisher and one consumer publishing as fast as they can.

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Over the weekend, RabbitMQ co-sponsored London Realtime, two nights and two days of unadulterated hackery. It was all put on by the apparently indefatigable^* crew at GoSquared, a very impressive debut effort.

As a co-sponsor we had one of the iPad prizes to award. We decided to allow hacks that used one or more of RabbitMQ, SockJS, or Cloud Foundry. This meant that about half of the twenty-seven hacks were eligible when it came to judging, making the choice rather difficult. Read the rest of this entry »

So today I would like to talk about some aspects of RabbitMQ's performance. There are a huge number of variables that feed into the overall level of performance you can get from a RabbitMQ server, and today we're going to try tweaking some of them and seeing what we can see.

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