Chapter 6. Network connections 6.1. Automatic failover A client can receive information about all master and slave brokers, so that in the event of a connection failure, it can reconnect to the slave broker. The slave broker then automatically re-creates any sessions and consumers that existed on each connection before failover. This feature saves you from having to hand-code manual reconnection logic in your applications. When a session is recreated on the slave, it does not have any knowledge of messages already sent or acknowledged. Any in-flight sends or acknowledgements at the time of failover might also be lost. However, even without transparent failover, it is simple to guarantee once and only once delivery, even in the case of failure, by using a combination of duplicate detection and retrying of transactions. Clients detect connection failure when they have not received packets from the broker within a configurable period of time. See Section 6.3, "Detecting dead connections" for more information. You have a number of methods to configure clients to receive information about master and slave. One option is to configure clients to connect to a specific broker and then receive information about the other brokers in the cluster. See Section 6.7, "Configuring static discovery" for more information. The most common way, however, is to use broker discovery . For details on how to configure broker discovery, see Section 6.6, "Configuring dynamic discovery" . Also, you can configure the client by adding parameters to the query string of the URI used to connect to the broker, as in the example below. Procedure To configure your clients for failover through the use of a query string, ensure the following components of the URI are set properly: The host:port portion of the URI must point to a master broker that is properly configured with a backup. This host and port is used only for the initial connection. The host:port value has nothing to do with the actual connection failover between a live and a backup server. In the example above, localhost:61616 is used for the host:port . (Optional) To use more than one broker as a possible initial connection, group the host:port entries as in the following example: Include the name-value pair ha=true as part of the query string to ensure the client receives information about each master and slave broker in the cluster. Include the name-value pair reconnectAttempts=n , where n is an integer greater than 0 . This parameter sets the number of times the client attempts to reconnect to a broker. Note Failover occurs only if ha=true and reconnectAttempts is greater than 0 . Also, the client must make an initial connection to the master broker in order to receive information about other brokers. If the initial connection fails, the client can only retry to establish it. See Section 6.1.1, "Failing over during the initial connection" for more information. 6.1.1. Failing over during the initial connection Because the client does not receive information about every broker until after the first connection to the HA cluster, there is a window of time where the client can connect only to the broker included in the connection URI. Therefore, if a failure happens during this initial connection, the client cannot failover to other master brokers, but can only try to re-establish the initial connection. Clients can be configured for set number of reconnection attempts. Once the number of attempts has been made an exception is thrown. Setting the number of reconnection attempts Procedure The examples below shows how to set the number of reconnection attempts to 3 using the AMQ Core Protocol JMS client. The default value is 0 , that is, try only once. Set the number of reconnection attempts by passing a value to ServerLocator.setInitialConnectAttempts() . ConnectionFactory cf = ActiveMQJMSClient.createConnectionFactory(...) cf.setInitialConnectAttempts(3); Setting a global number of reconnection attempts Alternatively, you can apply a global value for the maximum number of reconnection attempts within the broker's configuration. The maximum is applied to all client connections. Procedure Edit <broker-instance-dir>/etc/broker.xml by adding the initial-connect-attempts configuration element and providing a value for the time-to-live, as in the example below. <configuration> <core> ... <initial-connect-attempts>3</initial-connect-attempts> 1 ... </core> </configuration> 1 All clients connecting to the broker are allowed a maximum of three attempts to reconnect. The default is -1 , which allows clients unlimited attempts. 6.1.2. Handling blocking calls during failover When failover occurs and the client is waiting for a response from the broker to continue its execution, the newly created session does not have any knowledge of the call that was in progress. The initial call might otherwise hang forever, waiting for a response that never comes. To prevent this, the broker is designed to unblock any blocking calls that were in progress at the time of failover by making them throw an exception. Client code can catch these exceptions and retry any operations if desired. When using AMQ Core Protocol JMS clients, if the unblocked method is a call to commit() or prepare() , the transaction is automatically rolled back and the broker throws an exception. 6.1.3. Handling failover with transactions When using AMQ Core Protocol JMS clients, if the session is transactional and messages have already been sent or acknowledged in the current transaction, the broker cannot be sure that those messages or their acknowledgements were lost during the failover. Consequently, the transaction is marked for rollback only. Any subsequent attempt to commit it throws an javax.jms.TransactionRolledBackException . Warning The caveat to this rule is when XA is used. If a two-phase commit is used and prepare() has already been called, rolling back could cause a HeuristicMixedException . Because of this, the commit throws an XAException.XA_RETRY exception, which informs the Transaction Manager it should retry the commit at some later point. If the original commit has not occurred, it still exists and can be committed. If the commit does not exist, it is assumed to have been committed, although the transaction manager might log a warning. A side effect of this exception is that any nonpersistent messages are lost. To avoid such losses, always use persistent messages when using XA. This is not an issue with acknowledgements since they are flushed to the broker before prepare() is called. The AMQ Core Protocol JMS client code must catch the exception and perform any necessary client side rollback. There is no need to roll back the session, however, because it was already rolled back. The user can then retry the transactional operations again on the same session. If failover occurs when a commit call is being executed, the broker unblocks the call to prevent the AMQ Core Protocol JMS client from waiting indefinitely for a response. Consequently, the client cannot determine whether the transaction commit was actually processed on the master broker before failure occurred. To remedy this, the AMQ Core Protocol JMS client can enable duplicate detection in the transaction, and retry the transaction operations again after the call is unblocked. If the transaction was successfully committed on the master broker before failover, duplicate detection ensures that any durable messages present in the transaction when it is retried are ignored on the broker side. This prevents messages from being sent more than once. If the session is non transactional, messages or acknowledgements can be lost in case of failover. If you want to provide once and only once delivery guarantees for non transacted sessions, enable duplicate detection and catch unblock exceptions. 6.1.4. Getting notified of connection failure JMS provides a standard mechanism for getting notified asynchronously of connection failure: java.jms.ExceptionListener . Any ExceptionListener or SessionFailureListener instance is always called by the broker if a connection failure occurs, whether the connection was successfully failed over, reconnected, or reattached. You can find out if a reconnect or a reattach has happened by examining the failedOver flag passed in on the connectionFailed on SessionFailureListener . Alternatively, you can inspect the error code of the javax.jms.JMSException , which can be one of the following: Table 6.1. JMSException error codes Error code Description FAILOVER Failover has occurred and the broker has successfully reattached or reconnected DISCONNECT No failover has occurred and the broker is disconnected 6.2. Application-level failover In some cases you might not want automatic client failover, but prefer to code your own reconnection logic in a failure handler instead. This is known as application-level failover, since the failover is handled at the application level. To implement application-level failover when using JMS, set an ExceptionListener class on the JMS connection. The ExceptionListener is called by the broker in the event that a connection failure is detected. In your ExceptionListener , you should close your old JMS connections. You might also want to look up new connection factory instances from JNDI and create new connections. 6.3. Detecting dead connections As long as the it is receiving data from the broker, the client considers a connection to be alive. Configure the client to check its connection for failure by providing a value for the client-failure-check-period property. The default check period for a network connection is 30000 milliseconds, or 30 seconds, while the default value for an In-VM connection, is -1 , which means the client never fails the connection from its side if no data is received. Typically, you set the check period to be much lower than the value used for the broker's connection time-to-live, which ensures that clients can reconnect in case of a temporary failure. The examples below show how to set the check period to 10000 milliseconds, or 10 seconds. Procedure Set the check period for detecting dead connections. If you are using JNDI, set the check period within the JNDI context environment, jndi.properties , for example, as below. If you are not using JNDI set the check period directly by passing a value to ActiveMQConnectionFactory.setClientFailureCheckPeriod() . ConnectionFactory cf = ActiveMQJMSClient.createConnectionFactory(...) cf.setClientFailureCheckPeriod(10000); 6.4. Configuring time-to-live By default clients can set a time-to-live (TTL) for their own connections. The examples below show you how to set the TTL. Procedure Set the time-to-live for a client connection. If you are using JNDI to instantiate your connection factory, you can specify it in the xml config, using the parameter connectionTtl . If you are not using JNDI, the connection TTL is defined by the ConnectionTTL attribute on a ActiveMQConnectionFactory instance. ConnectionFactory cf = ActiveMQJMSClient.createConnectionFactory(...) cf.setConnectionTTL(30000); 6.5. Closing connections A client application must close its resources in a controlled manner before it exits to prevent dead connections from occurring. In Java, it is recommended to close connections inside a finally block: Connection jmsConnection = null; try { ConnectionFactory jmsConnectionFactory = ActiveMQJMSClient.createConnectionFactoryWithoutHA(...); jmsConnection = jmsConnectionFactory.createConnection(); ...use the connection... } finally { if (jmsConnection != null) { jmsConnection.close(); } } 6.6. Configuring dynamic discovery You can configure AMQ Core Protocol JMS to discover a list of brokers when attempting to establish a connection. If you are using JNDI on the client to look up your JMS connection factory instances, you can specify these parameters in the JNDI context environment. Typically the parameters are defined in a file named jndi.properties . The host and part in the URI for the connection factory should match the group-address and group-port from the corresponding broadcast-group inside broker's broker.xml configuration file. Below is an example of a jndi.properties file configured to connect to a broker's discovery group. When this connection factory is downloaded from JNDI by a client application and JMS connections are created from it, those connections will be load-balanced across the list of servers that the discovery group maintains by listening on the multicast address specified in the broker's discovery group configuration. As an alternative to using JNDI, you can use specify the discovery group parameters directly in your Java code when creating the JMS connection factory. The code below provides an example of how to do this. final String groupAddress = "231.7.7.7"; final int groupPort = 9876; DiscoveryGroupConfiguration discoveryGroupConfiguration = new DiscoveryGroupConfiguration(); UDPBroadcastEndpointFactory udpBroadcastEndpointFactory = new UDPBroadcastEndpointFactory(); udpBroadcastEndpointFactory.setGroupAddress(groupAddress).setGroupPort(groupPort); discoveryGroupConfiguration.setBroadcastEndpointFactory(udpBroadcastEndpointFactory); ConnectionFactory jmsConnectionFactory = ActiveMQJMSClient.createConnectionFactoryWithHA (discoveryGroupConfiguration, JMSFactoryType.CF); Connection jmsConnection1 = jmsConnectionFactory.createConnection(); Connection jmsConnection2 = jmsConnectionFactory.createConnection(); The refresh timeout can be set directly on the DiscoveryGroupConfiguration by using the setter method setRefreshTimeout() . The default value is 10000 milliseconds. On first usage, the connection factory will make sure it waits this long since creation before creating the first connection. The default wait time is 10000 milliseconds, but you can change it by passing a new value to DiscoveryGroupConfiguration.setDiscoveryInitialWaitTimeout() . 6.7. Configuring static discovery Sometimes it may be impossible to use UDP on the network you are using. In this case you can configure a connection with an initial list of possible servers. The list can be just one broker that you know will always be available, or a list of brokers where at least one will be available. This does not mean that you have to know where all your servers are going to be hosted. You can configure these servers to use the reliable servers to connect to. After they are connected, their connection details will be propagated from the server to the client. If you are using JNDI on the client to look up your JMS connection factory instances, you can specify these parameters in the JNDI context environment. Typically the parameters are defined in a file named jndi.properties . Below is an example jndi.properties file that provides a static list of brokers instead of using dynamic discovery. When the above connection factory is used by a client, its connections will be load-balanced across the list of brokers defined within the parentheses () . If you are instantiating the JMS connection factory directly, you can specify the connector list explicitly when creating the JMS connection factory, as in the example below. HashMap<String, Object> map = new HashMap<String, Object>(); map.put("host", "myhost"); map.put("port", "61616"); TransportConfiguration broker1 = new TransportConfiguration (NettyConnectorFactory.class.getName(), map); HashMap<String, Object> map2 = new HashMap<String, Object>(); map2.put("host", "myhost2"); map2.put("port", "61617"); TransportConfiguration broker2 = new TransportConfiguration (NettyConnectorFactory.class.getName(), map2); ActiveMQConnectionFactory cf = ActiveMQJMSClient.createConnectionFactoryWithHA (JMSFactoryType.CF, broker1, broker2);

Commands:
connectionFactory.ConnectionFactory=tcp://localhost:61616?ha=true&reconnectAttempts=3
connectionFactory.ConnectionFactory=(tcp://host1:port,tcp://host2:port)?ha=true&reconnectAttempts=3
ConnectionFactory cf = ActiveMQJMSClient.createConnectionFactory(...) cf.setInitialConnectAttempts(3);
<configuration> <core> <initial-connect-attempts>3</initial-connect-attempts> 1 </core> </configuration>
java.naming.factory.initial=org.apache.activemq.artemis.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory connectionFactory.myConnectionFactory=tcp://localhost:61616?clientFailureCheckPeriod=10000
ConnectionFactory cf = ActiveMQJMSClient.createConnectionFactory(...) cf.setClientFailureCheckPeriod(10000);
java.naming.factory.initial=org.apache.activemq.artemis.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory connectionFactory.myConnectionFactory=tcp://localhost:61616?connectionTtl=30000
ConnectionFactory cf = ActiveMQJMSClient.createConnectionFactory(...) cf.setConnectionTTL(30000);
Connection jmsConnection = null; try { ConnectionFactory jmsConnectionFactory = ActiveMQJMSClient.createConnectionFactoryWithoutHA(...); jmsConnection = jmsConnectionFactory.createConnection(); ...use the connection } finally { if (jmsConnection != null) { jmsConnection.close(); } }
java.naming.factory.initial = ActiveMQInitialContextFactory connectionFactory.myConnectionFactory=udp://231.7.7.7:9876
final String groupAddress = "231.7.7.7"; final int groupPort = 9876; DiscoveryGroupConfiguration discoveryGroupConfiguration = new DiscoveryGroupConfiguration(); UDPBroadcastEndpointFactory udpBroadcastEndpointFactory = new UDPBroadcastEndpointFactory(); udpBroadcastEndpointFactory.setGroupAddress(groupAddress).setGroupPort(groupPort); discoveryGroupConfiguration.setBroadcastEndpointFactory(udpBroadcastEndpointFactory); ConnectionFactory jmsConnectionFactory = ActiveMQJMSClient.createConnectionFactoryWithHA (discoveryGroupConfiguration, JMSFactoryType.CF); Connection jmsConnection1 = jmsConnectionFactory.createConnection(); Connection jmsConnection2 = jmsConnectionFactory.createConnection();
java.naming.factory.initial=org.apache.activemq.artemis.jndi.ActiveMQInitialContextFactory connectionFactory.myConnectionFactory=(tcp://myhost:61616,tcp://myhost2:61616)
HashMap<String, Object> map = new HashMap<String, Object>(); map.put("host", "myhost"); map.put("port", "61616"); TransportConfiguration broker1 = new TransportConfiguration (NettyConnectorFactory.class.getName(), map); HashMap<String, Object> map2 = new HashMap<String, Object>(); map2.put("host", "myhost2"); map2.put("port", "61617"); TransportConfiguration broker2 = new TransportConfiguration (NettyConnectorFactory.class.getName(), map2); ActiveMQConnectionFactory cf = ActiveMQJMSClient.createConnectionFactoryWithHA (JMSFactoryType.CF, broker1, broker2);