Is ActiveMQ unreliable?

Question

Hello,

We have been using ActiveMQ 5.2 in our distributed enterprise application for about 3 months. During that time, we have experienced debilitating failures at least twice weekly. In particular, we see:

1) Topic publisher has its connection arbitrarily closed and experiences EOF on attempt to publish. Note well that this issue is not a function of some timeout. It does not correlate reliably with any inactivity.

2) Queue listeners never receive message. Message simply sits on Queue.

2) is much rarer (hardly ever) than 1). In both cases, the failures are highly intermittent-- they cannot be reliably reproduced through any testing usage pattern. Also, there are no errors or warning in the AMQ logs.

Have others experienced similar problems? Is there an opinion that some other JMS provider is more reliable?

thanks,

Joe

Answer 1

Can't speak much about ActiveMQ, but at Big Investment Bank where I worked previously, Apache QPID was considered solid enough to standardise on:

http://qpid.apache.org/

I really liked it: it was liked the "Tomcat of MQ", very easy to work with, lightweight, low config overhead.

Answer 2

ActiveMQ uses Log4j for its logging activity. I'd recommend at least as a start to turn on all of the logging that you can to see if you can determine where the problem is. We use ActiveMQ ourselves but we embed the broker directly in one of the applications.

ActiveMQ has lots of little flags and configuration items that we ended up digging through the code to figure out.

Answer 3

Hi Joe,

as an ActiveMQ developer I can confirm that it is reliable and used by many enterprise-sized organizations.

However, if not configured and used correctly you can experience problems you described.

I'd suggest that you try to isolate your issues and try to get help on a "very active" user forum - http://activemq.apache.org/discussion-forums.html

Cheers

Answer 4

You might be having problems with how your flow control is configured. I had similar problem that I blogged about recently.