How can I configure ActiveMQ to drop a consumer if it just stops accepting data?

Today, I saw many errors on my ActiveMQ 5.3.2 console:

INFO | Usage Manager Memory Limit reached. Stopping producer (ID:...) to prevent flooding topic://mytopic. See http://activemq.apache.org/producer-f开发者_StackOverflowlow-control.html for more info (blocking for: 3422ms)

I did a little bit of poking around, and determined that the subscriber had gone out to lunch:

Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State      
tcp6       0 130320 10.208.87.178:61613     66.31.31.216:37951      ESTABLISHED

In this situation, I don't want the producer to block; I would prefer to drop the client completely. http://activemq.apache.org/slow-consumer-handling.html explains how to limit the number of messages queued, which is a good start, but isn't really what I want. http://activemq.apache.org/slow-consumers.html alludes to being able to drop a slow consumer, but doesn't explain how one might do this.

So, this is my question: is it possible to set up ApacheMQ to drop slow consumers completely, and how do I do so?

I would turn off producerFlowControl for the topics you want or all of them like so:

<policyEntry topic=">" producerFlowControl="false">

This has the ability to cause you to run out of memory or disk space now though because the message queue could keep growing. So make sure you set up an eviction strategy and pending message limit strategy like so:

<messageEvictionStrategy> 
    <oldestMessageEvictionStrategy/> 
</messageEvictionStrategy> 

<pendingMessageLimitStrategy>
    <constantPendingMessageLimitStrategy limit="10"/>
</pendingMessageLimitStrategy>

This will start throwing away messages after a limit of 10 has been reached. The oldest messages will be thrown out first.

AbortSlowConsumerStrategy which has been improved in Active MQ 5.9.0 should help in this aspect. I haven't had the opportunity to test it thoroughly for various configurations. But I think this is what you are looking for, especially ignoreIdleConsumers=true.

http://java.dzone.com/articles/coming-activemq-59-new-way

You can configure below property - "sendFailIfNoSpaceAfterTimeout" for throwing error to Producer, instead of blocking.

<systemUsage>
 <systemUsage sendFailIfNoSpaceAfterTimeout="3000">
            <memoryUsage>
                <memoryUsage limit="256 mb"/>
            </memoryUsage>
 </systemUsage>
</systemUsage>

I cannot give you an answer on how to drop the client ( in fact: i am not so sure it is possible all together) but what you can do is add a policy to not block the producer:

" memoryLimit="10mb" producerFlowControl="false"/>

This way, your producer will not suffer from slow consumers.