[jms] ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ or ZeroMQ or

We'd be interested to hear any experiences with the pros and cons of ActiveMQ vs RabbitMQ vs ZeroMQ. Information about any other interesting message queues is also welcome.

I'm using zeroMQ. I wanted a simple message passing system and I don't need the complication of a broker. I also don't want a huge Java oriented enterprise system.

If you want a fast, simple system and you need to support multiple languages (I use C and .net) then I'd recommend looking at 0MQ.

Why did you miss Sparrow, Starling, Kestrel, Amazon SQS, Beanstalkd, Kafka, IronMQ ?

Message Queue Servers

Message queue servers are available in various languages, Erlang (RabbitMQ), C (beanstalkd), Ruby (Starling or Sparrow), Scala (Kestrel, Kafka) or Java (ActiveMQ). A short overview can be found here

Sparrow

• written by Alex MacCaw
• Sparrow is a lightweight queue written in Ruby that “speaks memcache”

Starling

• written by Blaine Cook at Twitter
• Starling is a Message Queue Server based on MemCached
• written in Ruby
• stores jobs in memory (message queue)
• documentation: some good tutorials, for example the railscast about starling and workling or this blog post about starling

Kestrel

• written by Robey Pointer
• Starling clone written in Scala (a port of Starling from Ruby to Scala)
• Queues are stored in memory, but logged on disk

RabbitMQ

• RabbitMQ is a Message Queue Server in Erlang
• stores jobs in memory (message queue)

Apache ActiveMQ

• ActiveMQ is an open source message broker in Java

Beanstalkd

• written by Philotic, Inc. to improve the response time of a Facebook application
• in-memory workqueue service mostly written in C
• Docu: http://nubyonrails.com/articles/about-this-blog-beanstalk-messaging-queue

Amazon SQS

• Amazon Simple Queue Service

Kafka

• Written at LinkedIn in Scala
• Used by LinkedIn to offload processing of all page and other views
• Defaults to using persistence, uses OS disk cache for hot data (has higher throughput then any of the above having persistence enabled)
• Supports both on-line as off-line processing

ZMQ

• The socket library that acts as a concurrency framework
• Faster than TCP, for clustered products and supercomputing
• Carries messages across inproc, IPC, TCP, and multicast
• Connect N-to-N via fanout, pubsub, pipeline, request-reply
• Asynch I/O for scalable multicore message-passing apps

EagleMQ

• EagleMQ is an open source, high-performance and lightweight queue manager.
• Written in C
• Stores all data in memory and support persistence.
• It has its own protocol. Supports work with queues, routes and channels.

IronMQ

• IronMQ
• Written in Go
• Fully managed queue service
• Available both as cloud version and on-premise

I hope that this will be helpful for us. source

Few applications have as many tuning configurations as ActiveMQ. Some features that make ActiveMQ stand out are:

Configurable Prefetch size. Configurable threading. Configurable failover. Configurable administrative notification to producers. ... details at:

http://activemq.net/blog http://activemq.apache.org

ZeroMQ is really with zero queues! It is a really mistake! It does not hav queues, topics, persistence, nothing! It is only a middleware for sockets API. If it is what you are looking cool! otherwise forget it! it is not like activeMQ or rabbitmq.

It really depends on your use-case.

Comparing 0MQ with ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ is not fair. ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ are Messaging Systems wich require installation and administration. They offer featurewise a lot more than ZeroMQ. They have real persistent Queues, Support for transactions etc.

ZeroMQ is a lightweight message orientated socket implementation. It is also suitable for in-process asynchronous programming. It is possible to run a "Enterprise Messaging System" over ZeroMQ, but you would have to implement a lot on your own.

So:

ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, Websphere MQ & MSMQ are "Enterprise Message Queues"

ZeroMQ is a message orientated IPC Library.

I've used ActiveMQ in a production environment for about 3 years now. While it gets the job done, lining up versions of the client libraries that work properly and are bug free can be an issue. Were currently looking to transition to RabbitMQ.

Edit: My initial answer had a strong focus on AMQP. I decided to rewrite it to offer a wider view on the topic.

These 3 messaging technologies have different approaches on building distributed systems :

RabbitMQ is one of the leading implementation of the AMQP protocol (along with Apache Qpid). Therefore, it implements a broker architecture, meaning that messages are queued on a central node before being sent to clients. This approach makes RabbitMQ very easy to use and deploy, because advanced scenarios like routing, load balancing or persistent message queuing are supported in just a few lines of code. However, it also makes it less scalable and “slower” because the central node adds latency and message envelopes are quite big.

ZeroMq is a very lightweight messaging system specially designed for high throughput/low latency scenarios like the one you can find in the financial world. Zmq supports many advanced messaging scenarios but contrary to RabbitMQ, you’ll have to implement most of them yourself by combining various pieces of the framework (e.g : sockets and devices). Zmq is very flexible but you’ll have to study the 80 pages or so of the guide (which I recommend reading for anybody writing distributed system, even if you don’t use Zmq) before being able to do anything more complicated than sending messages between 2 peers.

ActiveMQ is in the middle ground. Like Zmq, it can be deployed with both broker and P2P topologies. Like RabbitMQ, it’s easier to implement advanced scenarios but usually at the cost of raw performance. It’s the Swiss army knife of messaging :-).

Finally, all 3 products:

• have client apis for the most common languages (C++, Java, .Net, Python, Php, Ruby, …)
• have strong documentation
• are actively supported

About ZeroMQ aka 0MQ, as you might already know, it's the one that will get you the most messages per seconds (they were about 4 millions per sec on their ref server last time I checked), but as you might also already know, the documentation is non existent. You will have a hard time finding how to start the server(s), let alone how to use them. I guess that's partly why no one contributed about 0MQ yet.

Have fun!

There is some discussion in the comments of this blog post, about Twitter writing their own message queue, which may be interesting.

Steve did extensive load and stress testing of ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, etc. ActiveMQ is actually quite slow (much slower than Kestrel), RabbitMQ consistently crashes with too many producers and too few consumers.

You probably won't have Twitter-like load initially however :)

There is a comparison of the features and performance of RabbitMQ ActiveMQ and QPID given at
http://bhavin.directi.com/rabbitmq-vs-apache-activemq-vs-apache-qpid/

Personally I have tried all the above three. RabbitMQ is the best performance wise according to me, but it does not have failover and recovery options. ActiveMQ has the most features, but is slower.

Update : HornetQ is also an option you can look into, it is JMS Complaint, a better option than ActiveMQ if you are looking for a JMS based solution.

Abie, it all comes down to your use case. Rather than relying on someone else's account of their use case, feel free to post your use case to the rabbitmq-discuss list. Asking on twitter will get you some responses too. Best wishes, alexis

I wrote about my initial experience regarding AMQP, Qpid and ZeroMQ here: http://ron.shoutboot.com/2010/09/25/is-ampq-for-you/

My subjective opinion is that AMQP is fine if you really need the persistent messaging facilities and is not too concerned that the broker may be a bottleneck. Also, C++ client is currently missing for AMQP (Qpid didn't win my support; not sure about the ActiveMQ client however), but maybe work in progress. ZeroMQ may be the way otherwise.

There's a comparison between RabbitMQ and ActiveMQ here. Out of the box, ActiveMQ is configured to guarantee message delivery - which can give the impression its slow compared to less reliable messaging systems. You can always change the configuration for performance if you wish and get at least as good performance as any other messaging system. At least you have that option. There's a lot of information on the forums and the ActiveMQ FAQ for configuration for scaling, performance and high availability. Also, ActiveMQ will support AMQP 1.0 when the spec is finalized, together with other wire formats, like STOMP.

Another plus for ActiveMQ is its an Apache project, so there is diversity in the developer community - and its not tied to one company.

I can only add my 2 cents about ActiveMQ but since this is one of the most popular:

The language you want to write in might be important. Although ActiveMQ does have a client for most, their C# implementation is far from complete compared to the Java Library.

This means some basic functionality is flaky (fail-over protocol that ... well ... fails in some cases, no redelivery support) and other simply isn't there. Since .NET doesn't seem to be all that important to the project, development is rather slowish and there doesn't seem to be any release plan. Trunk is often broken so if you do consider this, you might want to consider contributing to the project if you want things to go ahead.

Then there is ActiveMQ itself which has a lot of nice features but some very strange issues aswell. We use the Fuse (Progress) version of activemq for stability reasons but even then there are a couple of weird "bugs" that you want to keep in mind:

• Brokers that stop sending messages in some occasions
• Journal Errors making the queue show messages that are not there anymore (they don't get delivered to the consumer but still)
• Priority is still not implemented (is on the Issues list since the start of human kind)
• etc. etc.

All and all, it is a pretty nice product IF you can live with its issues:

A) are not afraid to actively get involved when using .NET
B) develop in java ;-)

More information than you would want to know:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Message_Queue_Evaluation_Notes

UPDATE

Just elaborating what Paul added in comment. The page mentioned above is dead after 2010, so read with a pinch of salt. Lot of stuff has been been changed in 3 years.

I have not used ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ but have used ZeroMQ. The big difference as I see it between ZeroMQ and ActiveMQ etc. is that 0MQ is brokerless and does not have built in reliabilty for message delivery. If you are looking for an easy to use messaging API supporting many messaging patterns,transports, platforms and language bindings then 0MQ is definitely worth a look. If you are looking for a full blown messaging platform then 0MQ may not fit the bill.

See www.zeromq.org/docs:cookbook for plenty examples of how 0MQ can be used.

I an successfully using 0MQ for message passing in an electricity usage monitoring application (see http://rwscott.co.uk/2010/06/14/currentcost-envi-cc128-part-1/)

If you are also interested in commercial implementations, you should take a look at Nirvana from my-channels.

Nirvana is used heavily within the Financial Services industry for large scale low-latency trading and price distribution platforms.

There is support for a wide range of client programming languages across the enterprise, web and mobile domains.

The clustering capabilities are extremely advanced and worth a look if transparent HA or load balancing is important for you.

Nirvana is free to download for development purposes.