What happend if I configure a queue size limit in rabbitmq?

Question

I'd like to find a way to limit the quantity of messages in a queue using rabbitmq. I read this article http://www.rabbitmq.com/maxlength.html where it say the following:

Configuring the "x-max-length" parameter Messages will be dropped or dead-lettered from the front of the queue to make room for new messages once the limit is reached.

My question is what happen with the dropped messages? We have logstash as publishers but we don't want to lose some data.

I hope to have explained clearly.

Regards.

Mijhael.

Answer 1

As official RabbitMQ doc on Queue Length Limit says:

Messages will be dropped or dead-lettered from the front of the queue to make room for new messages once the limit is reached.

So you can pick dead-lettered messages and process them somehow or just not using max-length on queue.

Answer 2

A dropped message is .... dropped. It disappears. Unless you have setup a dead letter rule where dropped messages will be put.