Feedback about ActiveMQ. How about it? Is it worth?

Question

we are evaluating ActiveMQ and I whould like to know what you think about it. Any feedback is welcome.

EDIT:

actually, I need to know things like: how does it scale? What about stability? Is it stable enough for production environments? Memory consumption, etc.

Answer 1

Here's my opinion & experience, for what its worth.

We have been using ActiveMQ in production for almost 2 years. We did have a couple of issues with ActiveMQ 5.1 that we had work arounds for, but since ActiveMQ 5.3 (we are using SNAPSHOT from July) we have not had any issues and have been happy. Our system pushes an average of 60 msgs/sec through the system with peak volumes > 700 msgs/sec. We run a single active/passive broker pair with persistence journaling via NFS mount to a dedicated NAS device.

--Steven

Answer 2

Its been used in thousands of production environments, some examples are Sabre Holdings (travelocity,lastminute.com,etc),FAA,CERN,JPL, etc - so its proven to be robust and perform:

• Sabre -32k transactions per second - that's reliable performance
• A large retailer (can't name them) - 10k+ stores, all connected with real-time updates over ActiveMQ - that's scalability

Answer 3

We have had customers move from ActiveMQ to FioranoMQ - they had the following problems that they reported - found Active MQ configuring very cumbersome/difficult to the point of giving up; and stability could not be achieved; support and documentation are a big issue as he said he can't get a working answer from them how to solve the problem which means even if they paid for support it might not help. Data loss prevention configs for non-persistant/persistant and stability are big concerns and ofcourse limitations on speed. Failure under peak conditions - eg. when message-rate spikes.