ActiveMQ prefetch and Spring DMLC advice from Torsten

A piece of advice on ActiveMQ prefetch and Spring DMLC from my colleague Torsten.


I just remembered a lesson learned about prefetch and Spring DMLC:
If you configure DMLC to use CACHE_SESSION or below (i.e. CACHE_CONNECTION or CACHE_NONE) *and* when you don't use a CachingConnectionFactory (e.g SingleConnectionFactory), then you should set the prefetch for the Spring consumer to only 1 or 0.
That is because when not caching the consumer, a new JMS consumer is recreated for every msg that Spring will ask the broker for.
And if there are many msgs on the queue, the broker will prefetch e.g. 1000 msgs to the consumer although the consumer will only process one msg.
Spring DMLC then recycles the JMS consumer with 999 unprocessed msgs. This obviously causes to much and unnecessary load on the network.

So possible solutions in this case:
1) prefetch=0 or 1,
2) configure DMLC to use CACHE_CONSUMER, or
3) use Springs CachingConnectionFactory