Java ActiveMQ client fails to receive messages

I am trying to implement performance testing on ActiveMQ, so have setup a basic producer and consumer to send and receive messages across a queue. I have created a producer with no problems, getting it to write a specific number of messages to the queue:

 for(int i = 0; i < numberOfMessages; i++){
          try{
           String message = generateText(sizeOfMessage);
           produceMessage(message);
          }
          catch (Exception e) {
           logger.error("Caught exception while sending message", e);
          }
         }

This continues to completion with no problems and I have confirmed this with checks on the admin website, that have the correct number of messages pending.

The problem occurs when I try to receive the messages from the queue. Using a simple consumer to read from the queue, it will read a various number of messages from the queue, but then will stop when trying to receive one of the messages. I can see that there are still messages in the queue to be read, but the client will not progress passed one of the messages. I am using a simple method to receive the messages:

Message message = jmsTemplate.receive();

and it works for some messages(about 20-30) but then just locks. It was suggested to me that some of the characters in the message may be an escape character (I was using a random string of varying length, due to this just being a performance test, not actually sending over any content) so I changed all messages to the same string, which is a repetition of the char '2' and still no luck. I am using Spring configuration to load all of the components needed to access the ActiveMQ queue, and the queue is running on my localhost.

From stackoverflow

• Not many views on this yet, but for future reference if anyone has the same problem, I have found the solution. The configuration for activeMQ limits the amount of memory used by the senders and receivers before slowing them down, the default values given to me were:

  <systemUsage>
              <systemUsage>
                  <memoryUsage>
                      <memoryUsage limit="20 mb"/>
                  </memoryUsage>
                  <storeUsage>
                      <storeUsage limit="1 gb" name="foo"/>
                  </storeUsage>
                  <tempUsage>
                      <tempUsage limit="100 mb"/>
                  </tempUsage>
              </systemUsage>
          </systemUsage>
  

  I removed this configuration completely and now it works a dream. I'm carrying out performance testing, so you may want to put your own constraints in, but this was definitely the cause of my problems!

• Its a classic issue with messaging; what to do with slow consumers. FWIW more recent ActiveMQ releases such as 5.2 allow you to spool to disk rather than blocking producers when memory gets low