Tervela Message Medium Blog | best effort messaging

But it worked in the lab... A deep and profound (please read it a couple of times) post by Kirk Wylie.  He claims that he's not trying to be down on best effort messaging, but he does have some valid points that we often hear from customers.

Here's a quote:

Best Effort = Development Win, Production Fail

 

Because the problem is that Best Effort systems seem much better than that in development. In development, you can run days without dropping a single message, no matter what size it is. In testing, you can run many test iterations without being able to force a message drop [2]. More importantly, you really can't force a message drop, at least not without implementing a lossy Decorator on top of the MOM interfaces. And that's a problem.

Best effort messaging is meant to be fast.  That's good.  But hardware (with some decent architecture) can make guaranteed messaging fast.  Check out our last post.  The reality is that there are many types and qualities of service when it comes to messaging.  Pick the one that makes the most sense for the applications you're running.  And be realistic.  To Kirk's point: a little bit of diligence in the lab will go a long way to avoiding surprises in production.

=rob.ciampa

Tags: best effort messaging (1) guaranteed messaging (2) kirk wylie (1) 

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