CODEWITHSUNDEEP
node.jsactivemq-classicstomp
Sangeeth Mukundan
Sangeeth Mukundan

Reputation: 742

What is the use of heartbeat in stomp protocol?

Currently I am using stomp protocol to send messages to activeMQ and to listen to messages. This is done in Nodejs using stompit library.

When the application is having high CPU or Memory usage, it stops sending heartbeat to broker. So the broker redelivers the message which is currently being processed, leading to repetitive processing of the same message

On disabling heartbeat, the application seems to work fine but I am unsure of the further issues disabling heartbeat might cause. Even when the broker is stopped while sending messages, behaviour seems to be same with or without heartbeat

I have read that it is an optional parameter but I am unable to find out it's exact use cases

Can anyone mention scenarios where no heart beat can cause issues to the application?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3679

Answers (1)

Justin Bertram
Justin Bertram

Reputation: 34988

Regarding the purpose of heart-beating the STOMP 1.2 specification just says:

Heart-beating can optionally be used to test the healthiness of the underlying TCP connection and to make sure that the remote end is alive and kicking.

Heart-beats potentially flow both from the client to the server and from the server to the client so the "remote end" referenced in the spec here could be the client or the server.

For the server, heart-beating is useful to ensure that server-side resources are cleaned up in a timely manner to avoid excessive strain. Server-side resources are maintained for all client connections and it helps the broker to be able to detect quickly when those connections fail (i.e. heart-beats aren't received) so it can clean up those resources. If heart-beating is disabled then it's possible that a dead connection would not be detected and the server would have to maintain its resources for that dead connection in vain.

For a client, heart-beating is useful to avoid message loss when performing asynchronous sends. Messages are often sent asynchronously by clients (i.e. fire and forget). If there was no mechanism to detect connection loss the client could continue sending messages async on a dead connection. Those messages would be lost since they would never reach the broker. Heart-beating mitigates this situation.

Upvotes: 4

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