MESSAGE QUEUE BEHAVIOR OPTIMIZATIONS

• US 20130066977A1
• Filed: 09/12/2011
• Published: 03/14/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 09/12/2011
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Katti, Jayteerth, Paramasivam, Kartik, Krishnaprasad, Muralidhar, Langley, Stuart John, Gurunath, Pramod, Morales, Elvin, Srivastava, Manu
• Granted Patent: US 9,015,303 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/206
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 51/226 Delivery according to priorities
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 51/23 Reliability checks, e.g. acknowledgments or fault reporting

Abstract

Network and storage calls are reduced by batching messages. Messages are collected from a client and sent to the gateway or backend application in one round trip. Alternatively, the messages are collected for different entities, and the batched messages are durably stored. Related messages, which may have the same sessionID, are grouped into a logical unit or session. This session may be locked to a single message consumer. A session may be associated with an application processing state as an atomic unit of work while other operations are performed on the messages in the session. Acknowledgements are accumulated by a broker on a message server, but the messages are not immediately deleted. Instead, multiple messages in a selected range are periodically truncated from a message store in a single operation. Expired messages for active sessions are proactive cleaned up to prevent sessions from reaching a quota or limit.

Claims

1. A method, comprising:

receiving messages at a message server from a source;

collecting the messages into one or more groups based upon properties associated with the messages; and

sending all of the messages in a selected group to a destination in a single transaction.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein each of the groups are buffered in a queue.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the destination is a backend application that processes the messages.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the destination is a gateway.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the destination is a durable message store.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the properties associated with the messages used for grouping comprise a destination address in a message header.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the properties associated with the messages used for grouping comprise source address in a message header.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the properties associated with the messages used for grouping comprise message topics.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the messages are acknowledgements of previously sent messages.

10. A method, comprising:

receiving a plurality of messages at a message server from a source;

identifying related messages within the plurality of messages, the related messages having a same session identifier;

grouping the related messages; and

associating the group of related messages with a destination.

11. The method of claim 10, wherein the related messages are grouped as a logical unit, and the method further comprising:

locking an association between the logical unit and the destination.

12. The method of claim 11, further comprising:

updating an association between the logical unit and the destination each time the destination consumes messages from the logical unit.

13. The method of claim 11, further comprising:

determining that the destination has not consumed messages from the logical unit within a threshold period; and

associating the logical unit to a new destination.

14. The method of claim 10, wherein the group of related messages comprises a session, the method further comprising:

associating a session state with the session.

15. The method of claim 14, wherein the destination is a message consumer that processes messages from the group of related messages, and wherein the session state represents application processing state for the destination.

16. The method of claim 15, further comprising:

associating the application processing state with the session as an atomic unit of work while performing other operations on the messages in the session.

17. A message server, comprising:

one or more processors adapted to process messages received from clients and to send the messages to consumers;

a system memory comprising a plurality of queues, each queue used to store groups of related messages; and

and a message broker adapted to collect acknowledgements for messages sent to consumers from the message server, the message broker periodically deleting multiple selected messages from the queues in a single operation, the selected messages corresponding to ranges of message acknowledgements received by the message broker.

18. The message server of claim 17, wherein the selected messages correspond to one or more lists of acknowledged message sequences.

19. The message server of claim 17, further comprising one or more of the processors operating to:

determine if a selected group of messages is loaded in the system memory;

determine if any clients are publishing messages to the selected group;

determine if any consumers have received messages from the selected group within a predetermined period;

if no consumer has been receiving messages within the predetermined period, then determine whether the selected group is nearing a quota; and

if the selected group is nearing the quota, identify and delete expired messages from the selected group.