Consumers

Each Consumer, or related group of Consumers, of a Stream will need a Consumer defined. It’s ok to define thousands of these pointing at the same Stream.

Consumers can either be push based where JetStream will deliver the messages as fast as possible to a subject of your choice or pull based to have control by asking the server for messages. The rate of message delivery in both cases is subject to ReplayPolicy. A ReplayInstant Consumer will receive all messages as fast as possible while a ReplayOriginal Consumer will receive messages at the rate they were received, which is great for replaying production traffic in staging.

In the orders example above we have 3 Consumers. The first two select a subset of the messages from the Stream by specifying a specific subject like ORDERS.processed. The Stream consumes ORDERS.* and this allows you to receive just what you need. The final Consumer receives all messages in a push fashion.

Consumers track their progress, they know what messages were delivered, acknowledged, etc., and will redeliver messages they sent that were not acknowledged. When first created, the Consumer has to know what message to send as the first one. You can configure either a specific message in the set (StreamSeq), specific time (StartTime), all (DeliverAll) or last (DeliverLast). This is the starting point and from there, they all behave the same - delivering all of the following messages with optional Acknowledgement.

Acknowledgements default to AckExplicit - the only supported mode for pull-based Consumers - meaning every message requires a distinct acknowledgement. But for push-based Consumers, you can set AckNone that does not require any acknowledgement, or AckAll which quite interestingly allows you to acknowledge a specific message, like message 100, which will also acknowledge messages 1 through 99. The AckAll mode can be a great performance boost.

Some messages may cause your applications to crash and cause a never ending loop forever poisoning your system. The MaxDeliver setting allow you to set a upper bound to how many times a message may be delivered.

To assist with creating monitoring applications, one can set a SampleFrequency which is a percentage of messages for which the system should sample and create events. These events will include delivery counts and ack waits.

When defining Consumers the items below make up the entire configuration of the Consumer: