How to clear messages from a JMS Topic based on age of messages

Question

We have an application that publishes event notifications to a JMS Topic. The issue noticed here is that after a considerable amount of time, the message store in Weblogic reaches more that 10GB in size. Is there a way to implement a component that can remove messages from a JMS Topic which have crossed a certain age (say 30 days)?

Currently in place is a process, during downtime activity the message store is deleted. The process however, has a prerequisite check from the owners of the subscribing applications whether actions based on last message have been processed or not.

Thanks

Answer 1

Message accumulation for a JMS topic indicates there is at least one inactive durable subscription or perhaps slow subscription consumers. In general, you can prevent this by removing inactive durable subscriptions, speeding up slow subscription consumers, slowing down message production so that consumers can keep up, etc.

If you don't want to retain messages older than 30 days then you can try using the "Message Time-To-Live" functionality defined by the JMS specification. Section 4.8 of the JMS 1.1 spec states:

A client can specify a time-to-live value in milliseconds for each message it sends. This value defines a message expiration time that is the sum of the message’s time-to-live and the GMT it is sent (for transacted sends, this is the time the client sends the message, not the time the transaction is committed).

A JMS provider should do its best to expire messages accurately; however, JMS does not define the accuracy provided. It is not acceptable to simply ignore time-to-live.

For more information on message expiration, see Section 3.4.9 "JMSExpiration."

The message's time-to-live can be set when the message is sent using either javax.jms.MessageProducer.setTimeToLive(long) or one of the overloaded send() methods. This will, of course, require changing the sending application's code.

Many brokers support setting the message's time-to-live or expiration time on the broker so that client modifications aren't strictly necessary. I'm not familiar enough with Weblogic to know if it supports this functionality or not, but it's worth investigating if you want to use this solution and don't want to modify your clients.

Answer 2

Came across the following code, which can help in clearing the messages by browsing thru the queue.

queue browser