Server

WorkManager Dead Letter Queue (DLQ)

Updated: March 18, 2024

Concept

Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) stream goal is to store Work in failure:

  • A work that is in failure after retries is skipped, resulting in a possible consistency problem. For instance, an indexing work that is failing after retries will be skipped resulting in a discrepancy between the documents in the repository and the one that is indexed.
  • When the cause of the failure requires manual intervention: fix a misconfiguration, restart a service, fix a disk full, re-deployment etc... a retry policy is not enough.

Frequently Asked Questions

How to reprocess the stuck messages and does it need to be done?

After retries, Works in failure are stored in a dead letter queue (DLQ) stream named dlq-work. This DLQ is activated by default on both WorkManager implementations (default and StreamWorkManager). Works in this DLQ can be re-executed for repairing purpose.

Works in failure stored in a Dead Letter Queue stream can be replayed using an automation operation or through a Nuxeo REST API endpoint.

Using the Automation Operation

The WorkManager.RunWorkInFailure automation operation has to be used as in this example:

curl -X POST "http://localhost:8080/nuxeo/site/automation/WorkManager.RunWorkInFailure" -u Administrator:Administrator -H 'content-type: application/json+nxrequest' -d '{"params":{},"context":{}}'

This returns a JSON result with the total number of Works re-executed and the number that were successfully executed:

{"total":3,"success":3}

You can get more details about this operation by reading the Nuxeo Explorer documentation page

Using the Nuxeo REST API Endpoint

Let's see now how to use the Nuxeo REST API endpoint for run works in failure:

Call Without Params
curl -X POST -u Administrator:Administrator http://localhost:8080/nuxeo/site/management/workmanager/runworksinfailure
Call With timeoutSeconds Param
curl -X POST -u Administrator:Administrator -d timeoutSeconds=10 http://localhost:8080/nuxeo/site/management/workmanager/runworksinfailure

In case of success, the server sends a 200 code, with:

{
 "total": 4,
 "success": 4
}

Does it contribute to any data inconsistency?

It depends on the work which is in failure:

  • For example, if it is about content reindexing, then all errors generate a gap between the repository (database) and the Elasticsearch indexes.

Are there best practices for avoiding messages to end up in DLQ or maintaining DLQ messages?

Nuxeo Work has to be be monitored, as well as the dlq-work topic. Please refer to the Observability page for more details.