How can i move UnAck messages to ready state in RabbitMQ

Question

There are some of the messages got stuck in UnAck state in RabbitMQ. Is there any way to move them to ready state without restarting the consumer application or without restarting the RabbitMQ server?

Answer 1

Unacked state literally means messages are being consumed and awaiting for Acknowledgement i.e. status update. If your messages are stuck in this state, it mostly likely means your consumers have not provided appropriate acknowledgements for those message.

You can provide acknowledgements in the following ways.

• ack the message. This signals to RabbitMQ that the message has been successfully processed/consumed and can be pop from the queue. See https://www.rabbitmq.com/amqp-0-9-1-quickref.html#basic.ack
• reject or nack the message. This signals that the message was not processed correctly and should be either "dead-lettered" or "re-queue", depending on the message/queue configuration. See https://www.rabbitmq.com/amqp-0-9-1-quickref.html#basic.reject

Alternatively, you can also set a TTL for your messages, in which case, they will be automatically reject if their time in the queue exceed their TTL. See here https://www.rabbitmq.com/ttl.html.