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Message Queuing Product

Posted: Tue Sep 03, 2019 5:34 pm
by vmskostoff
Looking for some ideas on a message queuing product to run on Alpha/Itanium on OpenVMS.

Re: Message Queuing Product

Posted: Wed Sep 04, 2019 3:37 am
by brett.cameron
There could be a number of options available here. Are you able to elaborate a little on your specific requirements? For example, would this be OpenVMS only, or would you need to integrate with applications running on other platforms? Any specific programming language requirements, performance/throughput requirements, availability, etc…

Re: Message Queuing Product

Posted: Wed Sep 04, 2019 10:01 am
by vmskostoff
Hi Brett,
Thanks for responding.
- The MQ product would need to interoperate with other applications on, for example Windows Server.
- No specific programming language requirements at this time.
- For performance/throughput/availability is yes/yes/yes.

Seriously, the MQ product is targeted toward a unique application for alerting in a manufacturing environment.
There needs to be flexibility with performance and therefore throughput should be high. Also coupled with this
would be high availability as well.

In terms of real specifications, we are targeting 500 mS turn around on messages from one system
to the destination node. Two nodes involved.

Current application is built around ftp and we believe we can achieve better, much better, in a MQ type product.

Re: Message Queuing Product

Posted: Wed Sep 04, 2019 1:32 pm
by brett.cameron
Thanks for the additional details.

Given the requirements, my immediate reaction would be to suggest using RabbitMQ (https://www.rabbitmq.com/) in conjunction with the RabbititMQ client kit for OpenVMS (Alpha and Integrity, available via the VSI sftp site). You would run the RabbitMQ broker on Windows (or Linux; either is fine) and use the OpenVMS client API in your OpenVMS application(s) to publish and consume messages as required, and use whatever language you prefer on the Windows side of things. This will give you more than enough flexibility around your messaging use-cases, will easily handle your performance requirements, and you can cluster brokers for high-availability. The software is freely available, and if you require assistance from an implementation perspective VSI can help.

Re: Message Queuing Product

Posted: Wed Sep 04, 2019 2:09 pm
by vmskostoff
Thanks again for the reply and recommendation.

Can you describe briefly the range of performance of RabbitMQ? Reason is I indicated a 500mS requirement but that
could ramp up with a reliable and FAST MQ product.
On the OpenVMS side, the client API can be used with: C?, C++?, FORTRAN? ??

Re: Message Queuing Product

Posted: Wed Sep 04, 2019 3:02 pm
by zia.ahmad@centene.com
Hello,

This MQ product is available from Willowtech.
https://www.willowtech.com

Regards,
Z A

Re: Message Queuing Product

Posted: Wed Sep 04, 2019 3:02 pm
by brett.cameron
There are many variables to consider when it comes to performance and indeed the term itself is perhaps a little ambiguous from an end-to-end perspective when it comes to message queuing products as there is by definition decoupling between publishers and consumers of messages; however if one assumes that messages will be consumed just as fast as they are published and you are not talking about hundreds or thousands of simultaneous publishers and consumers then 500ms would be considered slow by RabbitMQ standards, unless you were running the broker on some particularly constrained devise. Just now running a very simple test with a single publisher and a single consumer (both on OpenVMS) using 512 bytes messages and with the broker running on a moderately well powered (but not huge) Linux server I can quite easily achieve publish/consume rates of just under 30K messages per second. This rate will drop off with message size, and I am not persisting the messages to disk or using transactions, but it is unlikely that you’d use these features for an alerting system. The client API on OpenVMS can be used with C/C++, FORTRAN, COBOL, Pascal, …

Re: Message Queuing Product

Posted: Wed Sep 04, 2019 3:20 pm
by vmskostoff
Thanks for your replies ... Brett .... Z A