I want to create a WCF service which uses an MSMQ binding as I have a high volume of notifications the service is to process. It is important that clients are not held up by the service and that the notifications are processed in the order they are raised, hence the queue implementation.
Another consideration is resilience. I know I could cluster MSMQ itself to make the queue more robust, but I want to be able to run an instance of my service on different servers, so if a server crashes notifications do not build up in the queue but another server carries on processing.
I have experimented with the MSMQ binding and found that you can have multiple instances of a service listening on the same queue, and left to themselves they end up doing a sort of round-robin with the load spread across the available services. This is great, but I end up losing the sequencing of the queue as different instances take a different amount of time to process the request.
I've been using a simple console app to experiment, which is the epic code dump below. When it's run I get an output like this:
host1 open
host2 open
S1: 01
S1: 03
S1: 05
S2: 02
S1: 06
S1: 08
S1: 09
S2: 04
S1: 10
host1 closed
S2: 07
host2 closed
What I want to happen is:
host1 open
host2 open
S1: 01
<pause while S2 completes>
S2: 02
S1: 03
<pause while S2 completes>
S2: 04
S1: 05
S1: 06
etc.
I would have thought that as S2 has not completed, it might still fail and return the message it was processing to the queue. Therefore S1 should not be allowed to pull another message off of the queue. My queue us transactional and I have tried setting TransactionScopeRequired = true on the service but to no avail.
Is this even possible? Am I going about it the wrong way? Is there some other way to build a failover service without some kind of central synchronisation mechanism?
class WcfMsmqProgram
{
private const string QueueName = "testq1";
static void Main()
{
// Create a transactional queue
string qPath = ".\\private$\\" + QueueName;
if (!MessageQueue.Exists(qPath))
MessageQueue.Create(qPath, true);
else
new MessageQueue(qPath).Purge();
// S1 processes as fast as it can
IService s1 = new ServiceImpl("S1");
// S2 is slow
IService s2 = new ServiceImpl("S2", 2000);
// MSMQ binding
NetMsmqBinding binding = new NetMsmqBinding(NetMsmqSecurityMode.None);
// Host S1
ServiceHost host1 = new ServiceHost(s1, new Uri("net.msmq://localhost/private"));
ConfigureService(host1, binding);
host1.Open();
Console.WriteLine("host1 open");
// Host S2
ServiceHost host2 = new ServiceHost(s2, new Uri("net.msmq://localhost/private"));
ConfigureService(host2, binding);
host2.Open();
Console.WriteLine("host2 open");
// Create a client
ChannelFactory<IService> factory = new ChannelFactory<IService>(binding, new EndpointAddress("net.msmq://localhost/private/" + QueueName));
IService client = factory.CreateChannel();
// Periodically call the service with a new number
int counter = 1;
using (Timer t = new Timer(o => client.EchoNumber(counter++), null, 0, 500))
{
// Enter to stop
Console.ReadLine();
}
host1.Close();
Console.WriteLine("host1 closed");
host2.Close();
Console.WriteLine("host2 closed");
// Wait for exit
Console.ReadLine();
}
static void ConfigureService(ServiceHost host, NetMsmqBinding binding)
{
var endpoint = host.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(IService), binding, QueueName);
}
[ServiceContract]
interface IService
{
[OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)]
void EchoNumber(int number);
}
[ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single)]
class ServiceImpl : IService
{
public ServiceImpl(string name, int sleep = 0)
{
this.name = name;
this.sleep = sleep;
}
private string name;
private int sleep;
public void EchoNumber(int number)
{
Thread.Sleep(this.sleep);
Console.WriteLine("{0}: {1:00}", this.name, number);
}
}
}