Detect and Delete Orphaned Queues, Topics, or Subscriptions on Azure Service Bus

Question

If there are no longer any publishers or subscribers reading nor writing to a Queue, Topic, or Subscription, because of crashes or other abnormal terminations (instance restart, etc.), is that Queue/Topic/Subscription effectively orphaned?

I tested this by creating a few Queues, and then terminating the applications. Those Queues were still on the Service Bus a long time later. It seems that they will just stay there forever. That would be wonderful if we WANTED that behavior, but in this case, we do not.

How can we detect and delete these Queues, Topics, and Subscriptions? They will count towards Azure limits, etc, and we cannot have these orphaned processes every time an instance is restarted/patched/crashes.

If it helps make the question clearer, this is a unique situation in which the Queues/Topics/Subscriptions have special names, or special Filters, and a very limited set of publishers (1) and subscribers (1) for a limited time. This is not a case where we want survivability. These are instance-specific response channels. Whether we use Queues or Subscriptions is immaterial. If the instance is gone, so is the need for that Queue (or Subscription).

This is part of a solution where each web role has a dedicated response channel that it monitors. At any time, this web role may have dozens of requests pending via other messaging channels (Queues/Topics), and it is waiting for the answers on multiple threads. We need the response to come back to the thread that placed the message, so that the web role can respond to the caller. It is no good in this situation to simply have a Subscription based on the machine, because it will be receiving messages for other threads. We need each publishing thread to establish a dedicated response channel, so that the only thing on that channel is the response for that thread.

Even if we use Subscriptions (with some kind of instance-related filter) to do a long-polling receive operation on the Subscription, if the web role instance dies, that Subscription will be orphaned, correct?

This question can be boiled down like so: If there are no more publishers or subscribers to a Queue/Topic/Subscription, then that service is effectively orphaned. How can those orphans be detected and cleaned up?

Answer 1

In this scenario you are looking for the Queue/Subscriptions to be "dynamic" in nature. They would be created and removed based on use as opposed to the current explicit provisioning model for these entities. Service Bus provides you with the APIs to perform create/delete operations so you can plug these on role OnStart/OnStop events appropriately. If those operations fail for some reason then the orphaned entities will exist. Again you can run clean up operation on them based on some unique identifier for the name of the entities. An example of this can be seen here: http://windowsazurecat.com/2011/08/how-to-simplify-scale-inter-role-communication-using-windows-azure-service-bus/

In the near future we will add more metadata and query capabilities to Queues/Topics/Subscriptions so you can see when they were last accessed and make cleanup decisions.

Answer 2

Service Bus Queues are built using the “brokered messaging” infrastructure designed to integrate applications or application components that may span multiple communication protocols, data contracts, trust domains, and/or network environments. The allows for a mechanism to communicate reliably with durable messaging.

If a client (publisher) sends a message to a service bus queue and then crashes the message will be stored on the Queue until as consumer reads the message off the queue. Also if your consumer dies and restarts it will just poll the queue and pick up any work that is waiting for it (You can scale out and have multiple consumers reading from queue to increase throughput), Service Bus Queues allow you to decouple your applications via durable cloud gateway analogous to MSMQ on-premises (or other queuing technology).

What I'm really trying to say is that you won't get an orphaned queue, you might get poisoned messages that you will need to handled, this blog post gives some very detailed information re: Service Bus Queues and their Capacity and Quotas which might give you a better understanding http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh767287.aspx

Re: Queue Management, you can do this via Visual Studio (1.7 SDK & Tools) or there is an excellent tool called Service Bus Explorer that will make your life easier for queue managagment: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazure/Service-Bus-Explorer-f2abca5a

*Note the default maximum number of queues is 10,000 (per service namespace, this can be increased via a support call)

Answer 3

As Abhishek Lai mentioned there is no orphan detecting capability supported.

Orphan detection can be implement externally in multiple ways. For example, whenever you send/receive a message, update a timestamp in an SQL database to indicate that the queue/tropic/subscription is still active. This timestamp can then be used to determine orphans.

Answer 4

If your process will crash which is very much possible there will be issue with the message delivery within the queue however queue will still be available to process your request. Handling Application Crashes and Unreadable Messages with Windows Azure Service Bus queues are described here:

The Service Bus provides functionality to help you gracefully recover from errors in your application or difficulties processing a message. If a receiver application is unable to process the message for some reason, then it can call the Abandon method on the received message (instead of the Complete method). This will cause the Service Bus to unlock the message within the queue and make it available to be received again, either by the same consuming application or by another consuming application.

In the event that the application crashes after processing the message but before the Complete request is issued, then the message will be redelivered to the application when it restarts. This is often called At Least Once Processing, that is, each message will be processed at least once but in certain situations the same message may be redelivered. If the scenario cannot tolerate duplicate processing, then application developers should add additional logic to their application to handle duplicate message delivery. This is often achieved using the MessageId property of the message, which will remain constant across delivery attempts.

Answer 5

If there are no longer any processes reading nor writing to a queue, because of crashes or other abnormal terminations (instance restart, etc.), is that queue effectively orphaned?

No the queue is in place to allow communication to occur via Brokered Messages, if all your apps die for some reason then the queue still exists and will be there when they become alive again, it's the communication channel for loosely decoupled applications. Regards Billing 'Messages are charged based on the number of messages sent to, or delivered by, the Service Bus during the billing month' you won't be charged if a queue exists but nobody is using it.

I tested this by creating a few queues, and then terminating the applications. Those queues were still on the machine a long time later.

The whole point of the queue is to guarantee message delivery of loosely decoupled applications. Think of the queue as an entity or application in its own right with high availability (SLA) as its hosted in Azure, your producer/consumers can die/restart and the queue will be active in Azure. *Note I got a bit confused with your wording re: "still on the machine a long time later", the queue doesn't actually live on your machine, it sits up in Azure in a designated service bus namespace. You can view and managed the queues via the tools I pointed out in the previous answer.

How can we detect and delete these queues, as they will count towards Azure limits, etc.

As stated above the default maximum number of queues is 10,000 (per service namespace, this can be increased via a support call), queue management can be done via the tools stated in the other answer. You should only be looking to delete queue's when you no longer have producer/consumers looking to write to them (i.e. never again). You can of course create and delete queues in your producer/consumer applications via the namespaceManager.QueueExists, more information here How to Use Service Bus Queues

If it helps make the question clearer, this is a unique situation in which the queues have special names, and a very limited set of publishers (1) and subscribers (1) for a limited time.

It sounds like you need to use Topics & Subscriptions How to Use Service Bus Topics/Subscriptions, this link also has a section on 'How to Delete Topics and Subscriptions' If you have a very limited lifetime then you could handle topic creation/deletion in your app's otherwise you could have have a separate Queue/Topic/Subscription setup/deletion script to handle this logic...