ActiveMQ and MDBs - Prefer consuming older messages (prefer FIFO)

Question

We have a queue in ActiveMQ which is consumed by ~50 instances (sessions) of the same MDB.

The problem is that sometimes the queue receive a lot of messages and keep receiving lot of messages for various minutes. And the consumers is pulling the newer messages. So the older messages aren't pulled ultil the queue is almost empty. If the queue remain full (lot more messages than consumers) the older messages aren't consumed at all.

Is there a way to configure the ActiveMQ Artemis or MDB (Wildfly 10) to prefer pull the older messages from the queue first?

Answer 1

It sounds like the MDBs who may be consuming the older messages are slow compared to the MDBs consuming the newer messages. If the MDBs are consuming the messages locally you can set the "consumerWindowSize" to "0" to disable buffering.