RabbitMQ truncates to 50,000 bytes when viewed?

Question

I am considering going to RabbitMQ from MSMQ.

I was playing around it with and wanted to see the messages in the queue (usually easy with MSMQ).

It is a bit harder with RabbitMQ, but I made it work. But the help text says:

Furthermore, message payloads will be truncated to 50000 bytes.

That is less that 0.05 MB! My payloads are much much larger than that.

So here is my question, does it truncate just for viewing, or for the message that is put back in the queue too?

Also, can this limit be configured? When debugging, I would frequently need to see the full message.

Answer 1

It is only truncated when you view it (due to UI limitations; the assumption probably is that if the message is larger than 50k, then it is binary). The message with the same payload will be re-queued.

As for "peeking" into queues: I had the same problem, I wanted to check out what is flowing through the queues on our brokers. In the end I wrote a few tools to be able to do it from the command line. I usually create a temporary queue, bind it to the same exchange as the original one via the same routing key, and dump a few messages to disk.