What is your experience with ActiveMQ reliability using the latest version 5.4.2?

Question

I evaluate the message queues for use, and it seems that ActiveMQ is the most popular, but I cannot help but notice various comments on the network about reliability, and the queue occasionally hangs without an answer.

Does anyone use ActiveMQ (specifically the latest version) without problems for extended periods of time without rebooting with a reasonable load?

If ActiveMQ is really unreliable, what is a reliable alternative?

My requirements:

• JMS 1.1
• High availability
• Mature and popular product (I will not risk using any FancyMQ product for this project)

I would also like to know about the experience with HornetQ. It seems to be impressive in performance, but reliability is my main focus here.

Answer 1

I used ActiveMQ version 5.2.0 at Wufoo for about 1 year with a throughput of about 200k + messages per month. I am somewhat pleased with the reliability of the line itself. However, I had problems with client freezes when using STOMP with php. To clarify, I never had a problem sending to the queue, but deleting messages from the queue using php stomp lib was a bit of a mistake.

Now, take this with salt: we use a lengthy PHP CLI script to act as a kind of listener. PHP is not designed to run for long periods of time, so this could be a culprit. We are now moving on to 5.4.1 for some planning components, and we write PHP as a “listener,” instead we choose for camel routes. I hope that using a native protocol will solve these problems.

ActiveMQ books in action and Camel in action were invaluable.

Good luck

Answer 2

I had to abandon the use of Active MQ 5.2, as it would crash every few weeks with mysterious errors, which I did not have time to investigate. I would like to hear the opinion of more people about this.