I am evaluating Message Queues to use and it seems ActiveMQ is the most popular, however I can’t but notice the various comments around the web about reliability and the queue occasionally hanging without any response.
Is anyone using ActiveMQ (specifically the latest version) without problems for long periods of time without restart, with reasonable load?
If ActiveMQ is truly unreliable, what is a reliable alternative?
My requirements are:
- JMS 1.1
- High Availability
- Mature and Popular product (I won’t risk hopping on some FancyMQ product for
this project)
I would also like to know about experiences with HornetQ. Seems it impresses performance-wise, although reliability is my prime focus here.
I’ve used ActiveMQ version 5.2.0 in production at Wufoo for about 1 year now with a throughput of about 200k+ messages per month. I’m somewhat pleased with the reliability of the queue itself. However, I’ve had problems with hanging clients when using STOMP from php. To clarify, I never have trouble sending to the queue, but peeling messages off the queue using the php stomp lib has been a bit buggy.
Now, take this with a grain of salt: we’re using a long-running PHP CLI script to act as a sort of listener. PHP is not intended to be run for long periods of time, so that may be the culprit. We’re in the process of migrating to 5.4.1 for some of the scheduling components and we’re ditching PHP as the ‘listener’, opting instead for camel routes. I’m hoping that using a native protocol will solve these issues.
The books ActiveMQ In Action and Camel In Action were invaluable.
Good luck!