MQ Statistics Queue - how is this affected by PCF Requests? - monitoring

Lo all,
I was wondering, if I was to set STATQ to ON on my Queue Manager and began to track the statistics of a queue manager and it's associated queues...
Then if I was to do a PCF CMQC.MQIA_MSG_DEQ_COUNT request, would this affect the information I was getting through the statistics queue?
I'd think "yes", but I thought I'd ask here before I actually put it in place myself and tried it.
Thanks.

Update:
Yes, it does affect. Because to inquire the statistics, a inquire message is put to SYSTEM.ADMIN.COMMAND.QUEUE. You can test this with keeping MQ Explorer open and running amqsmon in a command window. You will notice both Put and Get count increasing.

Related

How can I get result of Dask compute on a different machine than the one that submitted it?

I am using Dask behind a Django server and the basic setup I have is summarised here: https://github.com/MoonVision/django-dask-demo/ where the Dask client can be found here: https://github.com/MoonVision/django-dask-demo/blob/master/demo/daskmanager/daskmanager.py
I want to be able to separate the saving of a task from the server that submitted it for robustness and scalability. I also would like more detailed information as to the processing status of the task, right now the future status is always pending even if the task is processing. Having a rough estimate of percent complete would also be great.
Right now, if the web server were to die, the client would get deleted and the task would stop as no client is still holding the future. I can get around this by using fire_and_forget but I then have no way to save the task status and result when it completes.
Ways I see to track the status and save the result after a fire_and_forget:
I could have a scheduler plugin that sends all transfers to AMPQ server (RabbitMQ). I like the robustness and being able to subscribe to certain messages that are output by the scheduler and knowing every message will be processed. I'm not sure how I could get the result it self with this method. I could manually adding a node to the end of every graph to save the result but would rather have it be behind the scenes.
get_task_stream on separate server or use it in some way. With this, it seems I could miss some messages if the server were to go down so seems like a worse option 1.
Other option?
What would be the best way to accomplish this?
Edit: Just tested and it seems when the client that submitted a task shuts down, all futures it created are moved from processing to forgotten, even if calling fire_and_forget.
You probably want to look at Dask's coordination primitivies like Queues and Pub/Sub. My guess is that putting your futures into a queue would solve your problem.
https://docs.dask.org/en/latest/futures.html#coordination-primitives

Prevent worker from receiving voice tasks by updating their voice channel capacity

I'm currently using task router to route calls to my workers and I want to temporarily prevent certain workers from getting assigned voice tasks. I thought by updating the worker channel capacity for voice to 0 or marking the voice worker channel as unavailable would mean that while the worker remains a part of the queues (based on their custom attributes), if there are any voice tasks coming in, they would not be assigned to that worker. That does not seem to be the case, my worker still receives reservations for voice tasks.
I tried to update my queue to only include workers that have voice capacity by adding this check to the Queue expression '... AND worker.channel.voice.configured_capacity > 0', however when saving the queue in the Console, I get an error saying 'Worker channel capacity expressions not allowed in TargetWorkersExpression on TaskQueue' which leads me to believe that this is not the right thing to do.
The only other solution I can see is to add the worker channel capacity check mentioned above to the target expression at every step of my workflow but that would be harder to maintain.
I can't help but feel that there's something I've missed or misunderstood about how the worker channel capacity works or what it is used for. For what is worth, multitasking is disabled for my workspace.
Twilio developer evangelist here.
Adjusting the capacity when you are not using multitasking won't make a difference.
I would recommend using a custom attribute on the worker and then filtering based on that within the target workers expression instead.

Background Tasks in Spring (AMQP)

I need to handle a time-consuming and error-prone task (e.g., invoking a SOAP endpoint that will trigger the delivery of an SMS) whenever a given endpoint of my REST API is invoked, but I'd prefer not to make my users wait for that before sending a response back. Spring AMQP is already part of my stack, so I though about leveraging it to establish a "work queue" and have a number of worker processes consuming from the queue and taking care of the "work units". I have, however, the following requirements:
A work unit is guaranteed to be delivered, and delivered to exactly one worker.
Shall a work unit fail to be completed for any reason it must get placed back in the queue so that another worker can pick it up later.
Work units survive server reboots and crashes. This is mandatory because I won't be using a DB of any kind to store them.
I know RabbitMQ and Spring AMQP can be configured in such a way that ensures these three requirements, but I've only ever used it to achieve RPC so I don't know much about anything other than that. Is there any example I might follow? What are some of the pitfalls to watch out for?
While creating queues, rabbitmq gives you two options; transient or durable. Durable messages will be available until you acknowledge them. And messages won't expire if you do not give queue a ttl. For starters you can enable rabbitmq management plugin and play around a little.
But if you really want to guarantee the safety of your messages against hard resets or hardware problems, i guess you need to use a rabbitmq cluster.
Rabbitmq Clustering and you can find high availability subject on the right side of the page.
This guy explaines how to cluster
By the way i like beanstalkd too. You can make it write messages to disk and they will be safe except disk failures.

MSMQ max count message notification

We are in process of implementing msmq for the quick storage of the messages and process them in disconnected mode. Typical usage of any message broker.
One of the administration requirement is to send the automatic notification to administrator/developers if the queue messages (unprocessed) count reaches 1000.
Can it be done out of the box? If yes then how?
If no then do I need to write some windows service (or any sort of scheduler) to check the count every x-seconds?
Any suggestions or past experience is welcome..
The only (partially) built-in solution would be to set up the MSMQ Queue performance counter which gives you this information for private queues on the server.
There are a number of other solutions, including a SCOM management pack, and some third party solutions like evtools, or you could roll you own using System.Messaging.
Hope this is of help.
There's commercial solution for this - QueueMonitor.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of that software.
Edit
Few tips for this scenario:
set message's UseDeadLetterQueue to true - this way if there's any issue with delivering messages at least they won't be lost but moved to system's dead letter queue.
set message's Recoverable property to true - it does reduce performance, but for this kind of long running scenario there's too much risk that some restart or failure would loose messages which are only stored in memory.
if messages are no longer valid after some period, you can use TimeToReachQueue to automatically delete them.

Executing large numbers of asynchronous IO-bound operations in Rails

I'm working on a Rails application that periodically needs to perform large numbers of IO-bound operations. These operations can be performed asynchronously. For example, once per day, for each user, the system needs to query Salesforce.com to fetch the user's current list of accounts (companies) that he's tracking. This results in huge numbers (potentially > 100k) of small queries.
Our current approach is to use ActiveMQ with ActiveMessaging. Each of our users is pushed onto a queue as a different message. Then, the consumer pulls the user off the queue, queries Salesforce.com, and processes the results. But this approach gives us horrible performance. Within a single poller process, we can only process a single user at a time. So, the Salesforce.com queries become serialized. Unless we run literally hundreds of poller processes, we can't come anywhere close to saturating the server running poller.
We're looking at EventMachine as an alternative. It has the advantage of allowing us to kickoff large numbers of Salesforce.com queries concurrently within a single EventMachine process. So, we get great parallelism and utilization of our server.
But there are two problems with EventMachine. 1) We lose the reliable message delivery we had with ActiveMQ/ActiveMessaging. 2) We can't easily restart our EventMachine's periodically to lessen the impact of memory growth. For example, with ActiveMessaging, we have a cron job that restarts the poller once per day, and this can be done without worrying about losing any messages. But with EventMachine, if we restart the process, we could literally lose hundreds of messages that were in progress. The only way I can see around this is to build a persistance/reliable delivery layer on top of EventMachine.
Does anyone have a better approach? What's the best way to reliably execute large numbers of asynchronous IO-bound operations?
I maintain ActiveMessaging, and have been thinking about the issues of a multi-threaded poller also, though not perhaps at the same scale you guys are. I'll give you my thoughts here, but am also happy to discuss further o the active messaging list, or via email if you like.
One trick is that the poller is not the only serialized part of this. STOMP subscriptions, if you do client -> ack in order to prevent losing messages on interrupt, will only get sent a new message on a given connection when the prior message has been ack'd. Basically, you can only have one message being worked on at a time per connection.
So to keep using a broker, the trick will be to have many broker connections/subscriptions open at once. The current poller is pretty heavy for this, as it loads up a whole rails env per poller, and one poller is one connection. But there is nothing magical about the current poller, I could imagine writing a poller as an event machine client that is implemented to create new connections to the broker and get many messages at once.
In my own experiments lately, I have been thinking about using Ruby Enterprise Edition and having a master thread that forks many poller worker threads so as to get the benefit of the reduced memory footprint (much like passenger does), but I think the EM trick could work as well.
I am also an admirer of the Resque project, though I do not know that it would be any better at scaling to many workers - I think the workers might be lighter weight.
http://github.com/defunkt/resque
I've used AMQP with RabbitMQ in a way that would work for you. Since ActiveMQ implements AMQP, I imagine you can use it in a similar way. I have not used ActiveMessaging, which although it seems like an awesome package, I suspect may not be appropriate for this use case.
Here's how you could do it, using AMQP:
Have Rails process send a message saying "get info for user i".
The consumer pulls this off the message queue, making sure to specify that the message requires an 'ack' to be permanently removed from the queue. This means that if the message is not acknowledged as processed, it is returned to the queue for another worker eventually.
The worker then spins off the message into the thousands of small requests to SalesForce.
When all of these requests have successfully returned, another callback should be fired to ack the original message and return a "summary message" that has all the info germane to the original request. The key is using a message queue that lets you acknowledge successful processing of a given message, and making sure to do so only when relevant processing is complete.
Another worker pulls that message off the queue and performs whatever synchronous work is appropriate. Since all the latency-inducing bits have already performed, I imagine this should be fine.
If you're using (C)Ruby, try to never combine synchronous and asynchronous stuff in a single process. A process should either do everything via Eventmachine, with no code blocking, or only talk to an Eventmachine process via a message queue.
Also, writing asynchronous code is incredibly useful, but also difficult to write, difficult to test, and bug-prone. Be careful. Investigate using another language or tool if appropriate.
also checkout "cramp" and "beanstalk"
Someone sent me the following link: http://github.com/mperham/evented/tree/master/qanat/. This is a system that's somewhat similar to ActiveMessaging except that it is built on top of EventMachine. It's almost exactly what we need. The only problem is that it seems to only work with Amazon's queue, not ActiveMQ.

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