Question

I’m having an intermittent problem with the Azure Service bus. Sporadically, placing a message on the bus causes the following exception:

TYPE: InvalidOperationException

MESSAGE: The operation cannot be performed because the brokered message ‘723eab13dab34351a78bb687d0923b89’ has already been consumed. Please use a new BrokeredMessage instance for the operation.

STACKTRACE

at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Messaging.MessagingUtilities.ValidateAndSetConsumedMessages(IEnumerable`1 messages)
at Microsoft.ServiceBus.Messaging.MessageSender.Send(TrackingContext trackingContext, IEnumerable`1 messages, TimeSpan timeout)
at Microsoft.Practices.TransientFaultHandling.RetryPolicy.<>c__DisplayClass1.<ExecuteAction>b__0()
at Microsoft.Practices.TransientFaultHandling.RetryPolicy.ExecuteAction[TResult](Func`1 func)
at IQ.IR.Core.ServiceBus.AzureBus`1.Enqueue(T message) in c:\BuildAgent\work\cc0c51104c02a4e9\IQ.IR.Core\ServiceBus\AzureBus.cs:line 69
...Rest of stacktrace snipped as it's within my app

The offending code from AzureBus is:

public void Enqueue(T message)
{
    using (var brokeredMessage = new BrokeredMessage(message) { Label = message.GetType().FullName, TimeToLive = _timeToLive })
    {
        _retryPolicy.ExecuteAction(() => _sender.Send(brokeredMessage));
    }
}

Where T message being passed in is

[Serializable]
public class ValidationMessage
{
    public string ValidationToken { get; set;}
}

And _retryPolicy is a

RetryPolicy<ServiceBusTransientErrorDetectionStrategy>

_timeToLive is a 12 hour timespan

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The error indicates that the message was “already sent” but an error occurred in the process. Unfortunately there is no easy way to know this by inspecting the message and the message cannot be reused again as it is considered consumed. We are working on some improvements such as allowing you to query the state of such a message and throwing a MessagingException instead of InvalidOperation. Finally the ability to clone a message will help to make recovery easier from such failures.