Retry With the RabbitMQ Binder

When retry is enabled within the binder, the listener container thread is suspended for any back off periods that are configured. This might be important when strict ordering is required with a single consumer. However, for other use cases, it prevents other messages from being processed on that thread. An alternative to using binder retry is to set up dead lettering with time to live on the dead-letter queue (DLQ) as well as dead-letter configuration on the DLQ itself. See “RabbitMQ Binder Properties” for more information about the properties discussed here. You can use the following example configuration to enable this feature:

  • Set autoBindDlq to true. The binder create a DLQ. Optionally, you can specify a name in deadLetterQueueName.

  • Set dlqTtl to the back off time you want to wait between redeliveries.

  • Set the dlqDeadLetterExchange to the default exchange. Expired messages from the DLQ are routed to the original queue, because the default deadLetterRoutingKey is the queue name (destination.group). Setting to the default exchange is achieved by setting the property with no value, as shown in the next example.

To force a message to be dead-lettered, either throw an AmqpRejectAndDontRequeueException or set requeueRejected to false (the default) and throw any exception.

The loop continue without end, which is fine for transient problems, but you may want to give up after some number of attempts. Fortunately, RabbitMQ provides the x-death header, which lets you determine how many cycles have occurred.

To acknowledge a message after giving up, throw an ImmediateAcknowledgeAmqpException.