How does a queue sender know that a consumer crashed?

Question

I'm using node-amqp. For each queue, there is one sender and one consumer. On the sender side, I need to maintain a list of active consumers. The question is when a consumer computer crashed, how would I get a notification and delete it from the list at the sender side?

Answer 1

I think you may not be using the MQ concept correctly. The whole point is to disconnect the consumers from the producers. On the whole it is not the job of the producers to know anything about the consumers, except the type of message they will be consuming. To the point that the producer will keep producing if a consumer crashes and the messages will continue to build up in the queue it was reading from.

Answer 2

There is a way to do it by using RabbitMQ's HTTP API (at http://server-name:55672/api/) to get list of connections, but it is too brutal for frequently queries. Another way in theory is to use alternate exchanges to detect undelivered messages, but I didn't tried this way yet. Also, it may be possible to detect unexpected consumer disconnection by using dead-letter-exchanges as described there: http://www.rabbitmq.com/dlx.html