Is there a way to breakup messages in an Error Queue?

Question

Our NServiceBus system fell behind this week (by 300,000 messages).

We currently process about 4 messages per second, so the catch up time was too long.

In an attempt to speed things up, we added more objects to each NServiceBus message (20 per message).

Normally we would only put more than one object in the message if it needed to be processed together.

But this change gave us significant performance improvements (we process around 8 messages per second now). We attribute this to less handshaking between the NServiceBus workers and the Distributor.

But now we have found a problem with this great solution. When a message fails, all 20 objects head to the error queue. When really only one or two of them have issues.

We need a way to break up those messages and try them again. Is there an option on the ReturnToSourceQueue.exe that could do that?

What we are trying for now is to hook up NServiceBus up to the error queue and pull the objects one by one and set a flag on them and send them back to the distributor to be processed individually. If we see a message with the flag set then we will send that to another "ReallyReallyErrorQueue". — Vaccano
Good approach - please add this as your answer so I can upvote it. — tom redfern

Adam Fyles Adam Fyles · Accepted Answer · 2013-09-21T14:34:39

You could also take over fault management using a custom fault manager to inspect the messages prior to forwarding to the error queue.

Is there a way to breakup messages in an Error Queue?

1 Answers