Sync your machine clocks!

When running ActiveMQ with producer and consumers spread across multiple machines, make sure to have the clocks synced on these machines!
Otherwise there might be interesting side effects when using JMS expiration times.

1) Consider the following simple scenario:
A broker running on host A with the local time 1.35 pm.
Secondly a producer/consumer pair running on host B with the local time of 1.30 pm.

In summary:
Broker time: 1.35 pm
JMS client time: 1.30 pm


The producer sends a message with a JMSExpiration time of 2 mins at 1.30 pm sharp. So the message expires at 1.32 pm. The broker receives the message, checks the expiration time and realizes the message is already expired. So it gets moved to DLQ immediately. The consumer will not get the message! This might be particularly surprising if the consumer is on the same machine as the producer and you start to wonder where your message is.
Note: The JMSExpiration time that is set on the message does not contain the value 2mins, but the actual time in future when the message expires (represented as a long). This value is computed using the local time of the message producer and compared against the local time of the broker before being put on the queue.

2) Now let's consider the opposite example:
In summary
Broker time: 1.30 pm
JMS client time: 1.35 pm

The broker's local time is 1.30 pm and the producers/consumers local time is 1.35 pm.
The Producer again sends a message with a JMSExpiration of 2 mins. It is received by the broker at 1.30 with an expiration time at 1.37pm. The message gets put onto the queue, from where the consumer can grab it. So all is fine in this scenario.

It is therefore highly suggested that the local times between all parties that participate in messaging are more or less synchronized. One simple option is to configure for NTP synchronization on each machine. There are many NTP tools available for all major operating systems.

If for whatever reason you cannot synchronize the times between machines (e.g. broker running externally), then I suggest to use a JMSExpiration time that include the delta of the time difference between machines. E.g. if the delta is known to be 5 mins, then perhaps set the JMSExpiration time to 5+ mins (adding enough time for message processing and delivery).
On the other hand if message expiration is an important requirement in your application, you should really try to synchronize times between all involved machines.

Part 2

This brings me to the second part of this post, the ActiveMQ TimeStampingBrokerPlugin.

From its documentation:

"This can be useful when the clocks on client machines are known to not be correct and you can only trust the time set on the broker machines."

1) Let's revisit the first scenario again:
Broker time: 1.35 pm
JMS client time: 1.30 pm

The plug-in can help you in this case. Because the plug-in will not only set the JMS message timestamp to the current time at the broker but also recalculate the resulting JMS expiration time again based on the broker's local time. Thus the message will not be marked as expired when it is handled by the broker. It is therefore put onto the queue from where the consumer can grab it. So the use of the TimeStampingBrokerPlugin can help to resolve the problem of scenario 1).


2) Now let's consider the second scenario again:
Broker time: 1.30 pm
JMS client time: 1.35 pm

The JMS producer sends the message at 1.35 pm local time with an expiration time set to 1.37 pm.
The TimeStampingBrokerPlugin resets the expiration time to 1.32 pm (2 mins based on the brokers local time). The message is put onto the queue.
The consumer that is connected has a local time of 1.35 pm. It will not grab the message!!
Why? Because from this consumer's point of view the message has already expired.

Such situation will generally be difficult to understand when looking at the system using either the ActiveMQ web console or JMX console. There is a message on the queue and there is a consumer connected but the message is not consumed!
You might not immediately think about JMS expiration times and different machine times. You will more likely start to think the attached consumer is hung or there is a bug in ActiveMQ.
If you configure for ActiveMQ debug logging in the consumer, you will notice that the consumer actually gets the message from the queue but it will discard it due to its expiration time. Under debug logging the following is printed:

ActiveMQMessageConsumer DEBUG ID:nbwfhtmielke-4668-1294676704879-2:0:1:1 received expired message: MessageDispatch {commandId = 0, … expiration = 1294675812454,
timestamp = 1294674812454, …}

There is a possible solution though, that is to use the plug-in configuration property futureOnly="true". If set to true the plug-in will not set the new expiration time on the message if it is lower than the original expiration time. It will therefore never reset the expiration time to a lower value. Instead the original expiration time gets preserved. That way the remote consumer will grab the message.


Note: You could also run into this problem with a camel-jms route using INOUT message exchange pattern and connecting to an external broker that has this plug-in configured.
camel-jms uses requestTimeout=20 secs by default. That generates a JMSExpiration message header with an expiration time of 20 secs. If the broker's local time is only 30 seconds (or even less) behind the local time of the JMS consumer, the same issue of the message not getting consumed might occur.

Conclusion: If somehow possible, sync the machine clocks on all machines that are involved in the message exchange. If that is not possible, check the time differences and recalculate your JMS expiration times.