Can I have each consumer receive the same messages? Ie, both consumers get message 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6? What is this called in AMQP/RabbitMQ speak? How is it normally configured?
No, not if the consumers are on the same queue. From RabbitMQ's AMQP Concepts guide:
it is important to understand that, in AMQP 0-9-1, messages are load balanced between consumers.
This seems to imply that round-robin behavior within a queue is a given, and not configurable. Ie, separate queues are required in order to have the same message ID be handled by multiple consumers.
Is this commonly done? Should I just have the exchange route the message into two separate queues, with a single consumer, instead?
No it's not, single queue/multiple consumers with each each consumer handling the same message ID isn't possible. Having the exchange route the message onto into two separate queues is indeed better.
As I don't require too complex routing, a fanout exchange will handle this nicely. I didn't focus too much on Exchanges earlier as node-amqp has the concept of a 'default exchange' allowing you to publish messages to a connection directly, however most AMQP messages are published to a specific exchange.
Here's my fanout exchange, both sending and receiving:
var amqp = require('amqp');
var connection = amqp.createConnection({ host: "localhost", port: 5672 });
var count = 1;
connection.on('ready', function () {
connection.exchange("my_exchange", options={type:'fanout'}, function(exchange) {
var sendMessage = function(exchange, payload) {
console.log('about to publish')
var encoded_payload = JSON.stringify(payload);
exchange.publish('', encoded_payload, {})
}
// Recieve messages
connection.queue("my_queue_name", function(queue){
console.log('Created queue')
queue.bind(exchange, '');
queue.subscribe(function (message) {
console.log('subscribed to queue')
var encoded_payload = unescape(message.data)
var payload = JSON.parse(encoded_payload)
console.log('Recieved a message:')
console.log(payload)
})
})
setInterval( function() {
var test_message = 'TEST '+count
sendMessage(exchange, test_message)
count += 1;
}, 2000)
})
})