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How to know if there is message ready to consume

I am new to Kafka and looking for a way to know if the message is ready for consumption to the consumer before calling consume method.
I am doing the POC on integrating C# with Kafka, previously I did that for RabbitMQ which has a method "MessageCount", but for Kafka, I cannot find any.

Actually Kafka has an infinite loop, in which it calls the poll() function to get eventual new records from a partition.
The configuration : max.poll.intervall.ms, specifies the interval of time after which, if the poll() function is not called, the consumer is considered dead and a rebalance is operated.
So to answer your question, Kafka always calls the poll() function to check if a message is available to be consummed. However, there some consumer configurations that allow to wait for a minimum size of messages before consumming the message:
fetch.min.bytes : you will wait untill you have x bytes of messages to consume them
fetch.max.wait.ms : set how much time you are gonna wait for the fetch.min.bytes to be gathered

In theory, if you can view if messages exist you are already using processes to connect to kafka. So you might as well just do a try catch with consume with the same performance.

Pub/Sub Redis, can I monitor whether any published messages are consumed?

I have a redis instance that publishes messages via different topics. Instead of implementing a complex heartbeat mechanism (complex because the instance would stop publishing messages after some time if they are not consumed), is there a way to check whether pubs are consumed by anyone?
For example, instance RedisServer publishes messages to topic1 and topic2. RedisClient1 subscribes to topic1 and RedisClient2 subscribes to topic2. When RedisClient2 for whatever reason stops consuming messages of topic2 then I want RedisServer to know about it and decide when to stop publishing messages to topic2. The discontinuation of topic2 consumption is unpredictable hence I am not able to inform RedisServer of the discontinuation/unsubscription.
I thought if there was a way for a redis instance to know whether messages of a certain topic are consumed or not then that would be very helpful information.
Any idea whether that is possible?

Given you are using a recent-enough version of redis (> 2.8.0) these two commands may help you:
PUBSUB CHANNELS [pattern]
Which lists the currently active channels ( = channel having at least one subscriber) matching the pattern.
PUBSUB NUMSUB [chan1 ... chanN]
Which returns the number of subscribers for the specified channels (doesn't work for patterns however).
Note: Both solutions won't enable you to determine if a message was truely processed! If you need to know about completion of tasks (if your messages are triggering something), then I would recommend searching for a full blown job queue (for example Resque, if you want to stick with Redis)
Edit: Here's the Redis doc. for all of the above: http://redis.io/commands/pubsub

You can also use the result of PUBLISH. It will give you the number of subscribers that received the message: http://redis.io/commands/publish
This way you don't need to poll the PUBSUB command, just do your "stop publishing" messages logic after you publish a message.
At most you publish one message with no one subscribing.

MSMQ via C# - ACK that message received?

I'm sending a message to a private queue via c# :
MessageQueue msgQ = new MessageQueue(#".\private$\aaa");
msgQ.Formatter = new XmlMessageFormatter(new[] { typeof (String) });
msgQ.Send(msg);
It does work and I do see the message in the queue.
However, is there any way to get an ACK whether the message got to the queue with success ?
ps
BeginPeek and PeekCompleted is an event which is raised when a message becomes available in the queue or when the specified interval of time has expired. it is not helping me because I need to know if the message that I sent was received by msmq. BeginPeek will be raised also if someone else entered a message to the queue. and the last thing I want is to check via BeginPeek - from who this message comes from.
How can I do that?
ps2
Or maybe I don't have to worry since msgQ.Send(msg); will raise an exception if a message wasn't inserted....?

I think what you are trying to do should not be handled in code. When you send the message, it is placed in the outgoing queue. There are numerous reasons why it would not reach the destination, such as a network partition or the destination queue being full. But this should not matter to your application - as far as it is concerned, it sent the message, it committed transaction, it received no error. It is a responsibility of the underlying infrastructure to do the rest, and that infrastructure should be monitored to make sure there are no technical issues.
Now what should really be important to your application is the delivery guarantees. I assume from the scenario that you are describing that you need durable transactional queues to ensure that the message is not lost. More about the options available can be read here
Also, if you need some identifier to display to the user as a confirmation, a common practice is to generate it in the sending code and place it in the message itself. Then the handling code would use the id to do the required work.

Using transactional queues and having all your machines enroll in DTC transactions likely would provide what you're looking for. However, it's kinda a pain in the butt and DTC has side effects - like all transactions are enrolled together, including DB transactions.
Perhaps a better solution would to be use a framework like MassTransit or NServiceBus and do a request-response, allowing the reviecer to respond with actual confirmation message say not only "this has been delivered" but also "I acknowledge this" with timeout options.

As Oleksii have explained about reliable delivery.
However this can effect on performance.
What I can suggest is:
Why not create a MSMQ server on the machine that is sending MSG to other system.
What I am thinking is
Server 1 sends MSMSQ to Server 2
Server 2 receives adds to queue
Server 2 process queue/fire your code here to send a MSMQ msg to Server 1
Server 1 receives MSG (any successful msg with MSGId)
Do your further task
This approach can be an extra mile, but will keep your servers out of performance Lag.

Suggestions for developing a TCP/IP based message client

I've got a server side protocol that controls a telephony system, I've already implemented a client library that communicates with it which is in production now, however there are some problems with the system I have at the moment, so I am considering re-writing it.
My client library is currently written in Java but I am thinking of re-writing it in both C# and Java to allow for different clients to have access to the same back end.
The messages start with a keyword have a number of bytes of meta data and then some data. The messages are always terminated by an end of message character.
Communication is duplex between the client and the server usually taking the form of a request from the Client which provokes several responses from the server, but can be notifications.
The messages are marked as being on of:
C: Command
P: Pending (server is still handling the request)
D: Data data as a response to
R: Response
B: Busy (Server is too busy to handle response at the moment)
N: Notification
My current architecture has each message being parsed and a thread spawned to handle it, however I'm finding that some of the Notifications are processed out of order which is causing me some trouble as they have to be handled in the same order they arrive.
The duplex messages tend to take the following message format:
Client -> Server: Command
Server -> Client: Pending (Optional)
Server -> Client: Data (optional)
Server -> Client: Response (2nd entry in message data denotes whether this is an error or not)
I've been using the protocol for over a year and I've never seen the a busy message but that doesn't mean they don't happen.
The server can also send notifications to the client, and there are a few Response messages that are auto triggered by events on the server so they are sent without a corresponding Command being issued.
Some Notification Messages will arrive as part of sequence of messages, which are related for example:
NotificationName M00001
NotificationName M00001
NotificationName M00000
The string M0000X means that either there is more data to come or that this is the end of the messages.
At present the tcp client is fairly dumb it just spawns a thread that notifies an event on a subscriber that the message has been received, the event is specific to the message keyword and the type of message (So data,Responses and Notifications are handled separately) this works fairly effectively for Data and response messages, but falls over with the notification messages as they seem to arrive in rapid sequence and a race condition sometimes seems to cause the Message end to be processed before the ones that have the data are processed, leading to lost message data.
Given this really badly written description of how the system works how would you go about writing the client side transport code?
The meta data does not have a message number, and I have not control over the underlying protocol as it's provided by a vendor.

The requirement that messages must be processed in the order in which they're received almost forces a producer/consumer design, where the listener gets requests from the client, parses them, and then places the parsed request into a queue. A separate thread (the consumer) takes each message from the queue in order, processes it, and sends a response to the client.
Alternately, the consumer could put the result into a queue so that another thread (perhaps the listener thread?) can send the result to the client. In that case you'd have two producer/consumer relationships:
Listener -> event queue -> processing thread -> output queue -> output thread
In .NET, this kind of thing is pretty easy to implement using BlockingCollection to handle the queues. I don't know if there is something similar in Java.
The possibility of a multi-message request complicates things a little bit, as it seems like the listener will have to buffer messages until the last part of the request comes in before placing the entire thing into the queue.
To me, the beauty of the producer/consumer design is that it forces a hard separation between different parts of the program, making each much easier to debug and minimizing the possibility of shared state causing problems. The only slightly complicated part here is that you'll have to include the connection (socket or whatever) as part of the message that gets shared in the queues so that the output thread knows where to send the response.
It's not clear to me if you have to process all messages in the order they're received or if you just need to process messages for any particular client in the proper order. For example, if you have:
Client 1 message A
Client 1 message B
Client 2 message A
Is it okay to process the first message from Client 2 before you process the second message from Client 1? If so, then you can increase throughput by using what is logically multiple queues--one per client. Your "consumer" then becomes multiple threads. You just have to make sure that only one message per client is being processed at any time.

I would have one thread per client which does the parsing and processing. That way the processing would be in the order it is sent/arrives.
As you have stated, the tasks cannot be perform in parallel safely. performing the parsing and processing in different threads is likely to add as much overhead as you might save.
If your processing is relatively simple and doesn't depend on external systems, a single thread should be able to handle 1K to 20K messages per second.
Is there any other issues you would want to fix?

I can recommend only for Java-based solution.
I would use some already mature transport framework. By "some" I mean the only one I have worked with until now -- Apache MINA. However, it works and it's very flexible.
Regarding processing messages out-of-order -- for messages which must be produced in the order they were received you could build queues and put such messages into queues.
To limit number of queues, you could instantiate, say, 4 queues, and route incoming message to particular queue depending on the last 2 bits (indeces 0-3) of the hash of the ordering part of the message (for example, on the client_id contained in the message).
If you have more concrete questions, I can update my answer appropriately.

How can I throttle the amount of messages coming from ActiveMQ in my C# app?

I'm using ActiveMQ in a .Net program and I'm flooded with message-events.
In short when I get a queue-event 'onMessage(IMessage receivedMsg)' I put the message into an internal queue out of which X threads do their thing.
At first I had: 'AcknowledgementMode.AutoAcknowledge' when creating the session so I'm guessing that all the messages in the queue got sucked down and put into the memory queue (which is risky since with a crash, everything is lost).
So then I used: 'AcknowledgementMode.ClientAcknowledge' when creating the session, and when a worker was ready with the message it calls the 'commit()' method on the message. However, still all the messages get sucked down from the queue.
How can I configure it that ONLY an X amount of messages are being processed or are in an internal queue, and that not everything is being 'downloaded' right away?

Are you on .NET 4.0? You could use a BlockingCollection . Set it to the maximum amount it may contain. As soon as a thread tries to put in an excess element, the Add operation will block until the collection falls below the threshold again.
Maybe that would do it for throttling?
There is also an API for throttling in the Rx framework, but I do not know how it is implemented. If you implement your Queue source as Observable, this API would become available for you, but I don't know if this hits your needs.

You can set the client prefetch to control how many messages the client will be sent. When the Session is in Auto Ack, the client will only ack a message once its been delivered to your app via the onMessage callback or through a synchronous receive. By default the client will prefetch 1000 messages from the broker, if the client goes down these messages would be redelivered to another client it this was a Queue, otherwise for a topic they are just discarded as a topic is a broadcast based channel. If you set the prefetch to one then you client would only be sent one message from the sever, then each time your onMessage callback completes a new message would be dispatched as the client would ack that message, that is if the session is in Auto Ack mode.
Refer to the NMS configuration page for all the options:
http://activemq.apache.org/nms/configuring.html
Regards
Tim.
FuseSource.com