kombu/librabbitmq: ConnectionError: Couldn't revive channel

Question

1. I am using the producers pool group to publish a message to rabbitmq, but the publish call is failing with the following error:

.

    File "pubsub.py", line 314, in _publish
        producer.publish(message, exchange=exchange, routing_key=topic)
    File "/opt/ENV/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/kombu/messaging.py", line 172, in publish routing_key, 
        mandatory, immediate, exchange, declare)
    File "/opt/ENV/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/kombu/messaging.py", line 188, in _publish 
        mandatory=mandatory, immediate=immediate,
    File "/opt/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/librabbitmq/__init__.py", line 117, in basic_publish
    mandatory or False, immediate or False,
    ConnectionError: Couldn't revive channel

2. the strange part is that the message previous to this one for which I get this error is not reaching the consumer end. I am using transport_options={'confirm_publish': True} on the Connection object, which is passed to the producers pool.

3. The rabbitmq server is behind an ELB on AWS.

Any idea about this error above and why messages might be getting lost?

Thanks.