Patent ID: 8452842

Claim:
A method of controlling retention of publications in a publish/subscribe communications network including a message broker configured to receive publications from publishers and to send publications to subscribers without requiring a direct connection between the publishers and the subscribers, the method comprising: receiving, at the message broker, a plurality of publications on a common topic from at least one publisher, wherein the message broker includes a processor; identifying, at the message broker, for each of the publications on the topic, whether a more recently received one of the publications should overwrite another of the publications, responsive to an instruction received from the publisher of the each publication; storing, by the message broker for any received publication that is not overwritten, data indicating a time when the publication was published to the broker, data indicating a time when the publication was last requested by any of the subscribers, and a count of times the publication was requested by the subscribers; accepting and responding to requests, by the message broker, from at least one of the subscribers, each request specifying whether the subscriber is requesting only a most recent publication on the topic, all publications on the topic, or a specific subset of publications on the topic; and selectively marking ones of the publications for removal in response to at least one of: the count of times a selected one of the publications was requested and the time when the selected one of the publications was last requested.