Continuing the series of common MassTransit problems, I want to talk about what is likely the most common problem. Ever. All the time.
To be fair, there’s a good reason why it is. And we are totally open to input on how to avoid this
being the most common problem with MassTransit. But the number one most important thing you need to do…
is make sure each instance of IServiceBus has it’s own, unique queue to receive from. You can
see an example of this in our
demo code for customers.
Each customer needs to uniquely receive messages.
What happens if multiple processes receive from the same queue you ask? Well, on MSMQ you’ll see exceptions in the logs for non-transactional queues. But if there are no exceptions, then one process might read a message it doesn’t have consumers registered for and just discard the message. The process that message was destined for doesn’t get it.
If you are using RabbitMQ and you want to scale out, you might have multiple processes reading from the same queue. This is known as competing consumers and should be considered an edge case. There are some caveats associated with it before you head down that path.
TL;DR - every IServiceBus needs it’s own queue. Just how it is.
