Are alerts created for messages that have a reservation expire in IronMQ?

Question

I am using the alerts feature of IronMQ service provided by IronIO to start workers.

I have things setup so that a message is pushed onto the push queue. The push queue sends an alert that starts a worker. The worker pulls off the message on the push queue, reserving it. Sometimes for whatever reason the job fails, the reservation for a message expires, and the message becomes available again. However, from what I can tell, no alert is sent when the reservation expires on a message. So the message sits in the queue until another message is added to the queue firing an alert and starting a worker. But the new message is not processed.

Are alerts created for messages that have a reservation expire in IronMQ? Is there any documentaion that I missed describing what can happen?

I am working on having workers pull off multiple messages but I am running into issues unrelated to iron io when processing multiple messages in the same worker.

Also is there a way to pull off the top of the queue. To avoid pulling off messages that may be causing errors? Should I just modify my workers to delete messages causing errors?

Answer 1

Currently there are no alerts for when a message times out and goes back on the queue, but that does seem like it would be a good idea. I assume this is a pretty inactive queue? I made a feature request for this here: https://trello.com/c/XcHi0NdN/35-fire-alert-when-a-message-times-out-goes-back-on-queue

And regarding messages that are causing issues, your best bet would be to add them to a different queue (an error queue) and delete them off the original queue. Then you can go through the error queue to figure out why certain messages are causing you problems. This is known as a "dead letter queue" btw and we have a feature request for it here, please give it a vote! https://trello.com/c/bGnJcNa9/26-dead-letter-queue