How does NATS / JetStream "remember" subscribers?

Question

. 。 Answers to this question are eligible for a +100 reputation bounty. Achim wants to to this question. 。

I'm doing my first steps with NATS and see behavior I cannot make sense of, even after reading the docs quite carefully. I have a local NATS server (2.6.5) running. It was started with

./nats-server -js

I generate some messages with the following code:

async def main():
    nc = await nats.connect()
    js = nc.jetstream()

    await js.delete_stream(name="hello")
    await js.add_stream(
        name="hello",
        subjects=["hello"],
    )
    for i in range(0, 10):
        await js.publish("hello", f"hello world: {i}".encode())
    await nc.close()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

If I run the code and execute ./nats stream ls I see 10 messages. Everything fine so far. Next I run my consumer:

async def main():
    nc = await nats.connect()
    js = nc.jetstream()
    sub = await js.pull_subscribe("hello", "hello")

    msg_count = 0
    while msg_count < 10:
        for msg in await sub.fetch(1):
            print("Received:", msg.data)
            msg_count = msg_count + 1

            # Try nack'ing every third message
            if msg_count % 3 == 0:
                await msg.nak()
            else:
                await msg.ack()

    await nc.close()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

The output shows:

Received: b'hello world: 0'
Received: b'hello world: 1'
Received: b'hello world: 2'
Received: b'hello world: 2'
Received: b'hello world: 3'
Received: b'hello world: 4'
Received: b'hello world: 4'
Received: b'hello world: 5'
Received: b'hello world: 6'
Received: b'hello world: 6'

That makes sense: I pull 10 messages. Every third message is "naked", so it is retrieved again by the next call. If I start the script again the output is:

Received: b'hello world: 7'
Received: b'hello world: 8'
Received: b'hello world: 9'
Received: b'hello world: 9'

And after a few seconds I get a time out. Obviously NATS somehow remembers my script and continues with delivering messages. But I don't get how this happens?? Is there a "global" cursor in the stream, But in that case multiple clients would interfere. which does not make sense to me. So I assume that NATS somehow remembers my client? How? And how would I tell NATS that I want to restart? I would also appreciate a pointer to the docs that I obviously missed!?

Answer 1

When creating a pull subscription, the jetstream client API also creates a durable consumer with matching consumer options, in this case the stream name and a durable name (the second argument).

sub = await js.pull_subscribe("hello", "hello")

A durable consumer is intended to be long-lived and the server will keep track of where the consumer is in the stream. So if the consumer stops then restarts, it will automatically restart where it left off and the configuration used to initialize the consumer will be remembered. A durable consumer is required when making a pull subscription and is optional when making a push subscription.

Source: https://nats.io/blog/jetstream-java-client-03-consume/#durable-vs-ephemeral