Do you use ActiveMQ?

Posted by The Bull
June 5, 2008

So I read today where LinkedIN uses ActiveMQ as part of their architecture. I haven’t used ActiveMQ personally, but we use it for a project where I work and the guy that set it up absolutely hates it now.

We were looking to use a message server for a new project and started kicking around ideas. The primary requirement was multiple language support. New stuff is largely being done in Java but we also have a really large perl codebase and some backend stuff is still be done in perl. Naturally that made ActiveMQ a front runner because of its open language support. Once he got wind of the talks it was quickly shelved with “over my dead body”.

Turns out that despite the great documentation and its visibility, it doesn’t work quite as speedy as one would think. After fixing several bugs himself (out of order messages being one that I recall), the one glaring problem is performance. Seems that if a subscriber is a bit slow, the whole server becomes slow even on the receiving end. Well, that is just counter productive in my book. The whole idea of a message system is to eliminate these kinds of bottlenecks yes?

We then tried openAMQ (a C-based server) and that shelved too because it kept dropping messages. For the time being we settled on Websphere MQ which just makes me want to puke. I know IBM has had a message server forever, but I have yet to see a piece of software they’ve written that was worth a shit.

Hopefully we can find another solution before big blue takes a firm hold on us. Any suggestions?

Any really good experiences with ActiveMQ?

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