JMS Concepts – Persistent and Durable

I will tell you here what are Persistent and Durable and where these two words are applicable because these two words sometimes cause confusion to the users of JMS providers. Generally, Persistent is applicable to messages while Durable is applicable to subscriptions.

Persistent

A message can have either one of the delivery modes – Persistent and Non-persistent – when the message is sent by its originating client.

According to JMS specification when a message is sent with delivery mode as Persistent then JMS provider takes an extra care to ensure that message is not lost due to JMS provider failure. So in this scenario message will be saved on disk and sent later if consumer is inactive.

By default the delivery mode of a message is Persistent.

Now if you want to send the message with Non-persistent mode then you can specify the delivery mode at MessageProducer (QueueSender or TopicProducer) using the following snippets of code

messageProducer.setDeliveryMode(DeliveryMode.NON_PERSISTENT);

Alternately, you can achieve the same thing using the following snippets of code

messageProducer.send(message, deliveryMode, priority, timeToLive);

For Non-persistent delivery mode the message will be saved in memory and sent later if consumer is inactive but the message will not survive due to JMS provider failure.

You can read an example on persistent message using JMS

Durable

Durable is applicable only for publish/subscribe domain. A subscription on a topic can either be durable or non-durable.

Let’s create an example on Non-durable subscriber:

InitialContext initialContext = new InitialContext();
ConnectionFactory connectionFactory = (ConnectionFactory) initialContext.lookup("jms/ConnectionFactory");
TopicConnection topicConnection = connectionFactory.createTopicConnection();
TopicSession topicSession = topicConnection.createTopicSession(false,Session.AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE);
TopicSubscriber subscriber = topicSession.createSubscriber(topic);
topicConnection.start();
Message message = subscriber.receive(5000);
topicConnection.close()

Let’s create an example on Durable subscriber:

InitialContext initialContext = new InitialContext();
ConnectionFactory connectionFactory = (ConnectionFactory) initialContext.lookup("jms/ConnectionFactory");
TopicConnection topicConnection = connectionFactory.createTopicConnection();
TopicSession topicSession = topicConnection.createTopicSession(false,Session.AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE);
TopicSubscriber subscriber = topicSession.createDurableSubscriber(topic, "durSub");
topicConnection.start();
Message message = subscriber.receive(5000);
topicConnection.close()

So from the above two examples you see they are identical except in later case, where we have changed to createDurableSubscriber(Topic topic, String subName) to create a durable subscriber, where subName is a name used to identify the subscription.

The receive(long timeout) method blocks until a message is received or until the timeout period expires, whichever comes first.

The non-durable and the durable subscribers behave in much the same way. Whenever a new message is sent to the topic, a copy of that message is sent to both non-durable and durable subscribers. An open subscriber is said to be active.

The difference is when a non-durable subscriber is closed; it is considered as no longer exists and is deleted from the MQ broker. When a durable subscription is closed, however it continues to exist in the MQ broker, accumulating messages. A closed durable subscriber is said to be inactive.

Now consider the case when a subscriber is not available and message is sent to a topic.

If client connects subsequently and creates a non-durable subscriber; the subscriber will not receive the message that was sent prior to its existence.

However if client connects and creates a durable subscriber then the subscriber is re-opened and the message that was sent prior to its existence now will receive.

Note that durable and non-durable subscribers are only applicable to the topic because queue is having a single, built-in durable subscription shared by all consumers.

When a persistent message is sent to a topic, the MQ broker’s behavior depends on what subscriptions (if any) are present and in particular whether these subscriptions are durable or non-durable.

For durable subscriber, whether active or inactive, a copy of the message will be saved on disk and a copy of each message will be sent to the active subscribers, but for inactive subscribers the message will remain saved on disk until they become active.

For non-durable subscribers a copy of each message will be dispatched to them while subscriber are active but the messages are not saved either in memory or disk. Therefore, a non-durable subscriber which connects after the message was sent will not receive the message.

Please have a look at the example Durable Subscription

Thanks for reading.

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