Question

It seems the longer I keep my rabbitmq server running, the more trouble I have with unacknowledged messages. I would love to requeue them. In fact there seems to be an amqp command to do this, but it only applies to the channel that your connection is using. I built a little pika script to at least try it out, but I am either missing something or it cannot be done this way (how about with rabbitmqctl?)

import pika

credentials = pika.PlainCredentials('***', '***')
parameters = pika.ConnectionParameters(host='localhost',port=5672,\
    credentials=credentials, virtual_host='***')

def handle_delivery(body):
    """Called when we receive a message from RabbitMQ"""
    print body

def on_connected(connection):
    """Called when we are fully connected to RabbitMQ"""
    connection.channel(on_channel_open)    

def on_channel_open(new_channel):
    """Called when our channel has opened"""
    global channel
    channel = new_channel
    channel.basic_recover(callback=handle_delivery,requeue=True)    

try:
    connection = pika.SelectConnection(parameters=parameters,\
        on_open_callback=on_connected)    

    # Loop so we can communicate with RabbitMQ
    connection.ioloop.start()
except KeyboardInterrupt:
    # Gracefully close the connection
    connection.close()
    # Loop until we're fully closed, will stop on its own
    connection.ioloop.start()

Answer 1

Unacknowledged messages are those which have been delivered across the network to a consumer but have not yet been ack’ed or rejected — but that consumer hasn’t yet closed the channel or connection over which it originally received them. Therefore the broker can’t figure out if the consumer is just taking a long time to process those messages or if it has forgotten about them. So, it leaves them in an unacknowledged state until either the consumer dies or they get ack’ed or rejected.

Since those messages could still be validly processed in the future by the still-alive consumer that originally consumed them, you can’t (to my knowledge) insert another consumer into the mix and try to make external decisions about them. You need to fix your consumers to make decisions about each message as they get processed rather than leaving old messages unacknowledged.