Chapter 7. Paging Messages

Messages are stored per address on the file system. Each address has an individual folder where messages are stored in multiple files (page files). Each file will contain messages up to a max configured size (page-size-bytes). The system will navigate on the files as needed, and it will remove the page file as soon as all the messages are acknowledged up to that point.

Browsers will read through the page-cursor system.

Consumers with selectors will also navigate through the page-files and ignore messages that don’t match the criteria.

To configure the location of the paging directory, add the paging-directory configuration element to the broker’s main configuration file BROKER_INSTANCE_DIR/etc/broker.xml, as in the example below.

<configuration ...>
  ...
  <core ...>
    <paging-directory>/somewhere/paging-directory</paging-directory>
    ...
  </core>
</configuration>

AMQ Broker will create one directory for each address being paged under the configured location.

Configuration for paging is done at the address level by adding elements to a specific address-settings, as in the example below.

<address-settings>
   <address-setting match="jms.paged.queue">
      <max-size-bytes>104857600</max-size-bytes>
      <page-size-bytes>10485760</page-size-bytes>
      <address-full-policy>PAGE</address-full-policy>
   </address-setting>
</address-settings>

In the example above, when messages sent to the address jms.paged.queue exceed 104857600 bytes in memory, the broker will begin paging.

This is the list of available parameters on the address settings.

Sometimes configuring a memory limit per address is not practical, such as when a broker manages many addresses that have different usage patterns. In these situations, use the global-max-size parameter to set a global limit to the amount of memory the broker can use before it enters into the page mode configured for the address associated with the incoming message.

The default value for global-max-size is half of the maximum memory available to the Java virtual machine (JVM). You can specify your own value for this parameter by configuring it in the broker.xml configuration file. The value for global-max-size is in bytes, but you can use byte notation ("K", "Mb", "GB", for example) for convenience.

The following procedure shows how to configure the global-max-size parameter in the broker.xml configuration file.

Configuring the global-max-size parameter

You can limit the amount of physical disk the broker uses before it blocks incoming messages rather than pages them. Add the max-disk-usage to the broker.xml configuration file and provide a value for the percentage of disk space the broker is allowed to use when paging messages. The default value for max-disk-usage is 90, which means the limit is set at 90 percent of disk space.

Configuring the max-disk-usage

Instead of paging messages when the max size is reached, an address can also be configured to just drop messages when the address is full.

To do this just set the address-full-policy to DROP in the address settings

Instead of paging messages when the max size is reached, an address can also be configured to block producers from sending further messages when the address is full, thus preventing the memory from being exhausted on the server.

When memory is freed up on the server, producers will automatically unblock and be able to continue sending.

To do this just set the address-full-policy to BLOCK in the address settings.

In the default configuration, all addresses are configured to block producers after 10 MiB of data are in the address.

When a message is routed to an address that has multicast queues bound to it, for example, a JMS subscription in a Topic, there is only one copy of the message in memory. Each queue handles only a reference to it. Because of this the memory is only freed up after all queues referencing the message have delivered it.

If you have a single lazy subscription, the entire address will suffer IO performance hit as all the queues will have messages being sent through an extra storage on the paging system.

For example:

In this example, all the other 9 queues will be consuming messages from the page system. This may cause performance issues if this is an undesirable state.