Configuring your broker network to prefer the shortest route does not ensure that routing is deterministic. Under heavy load, the brokers will use the alternate routes to optimize performance. The danger of this is that if the message is routed along the longer alternate route and the consumer dies, the route becomes a dead-end and the message becomes stuck.

Fuse Message Broker allows you to configure your network connectors to suppress duplicate subscriptions that arise from intermediary brokers. This has the effect of eliminating alternate paths between the networked brokers because only direct connections are recognized.

To suppress duplicate subscriptions you set the networkConnector element's suppressDuplicateQueueSubscriptions attribute to true on all of the network connectors in you network. Example 9 shows a network connector that is configured to suppress duplicate routes.

<networkConnectors>
    <networkConnector name="linkToBrokerB"
       uri="static:(tcp://localhost:61002)"
       suppressDuplicateQueueSubscriptions="true"/>
</networkConnectors>

Fuse Message Broker uses the brokers' IDs to figure out duplicate routes. In order for the suppression of duplicate routes to work reliably, you must give each broker a unique ID by explicitly setting the broker element's brokerId for each broker in the network. Example 10 shows configuration setting a broker's ID.

<broker xmlns="http://activemq.apache.org/schema/core"
        brokerName="brokerA" brokerId="A"... >
    ...
</broker>

Consider the network of brokers, A, B, and C, shown in Figure 17. In this scenario, a producer, P, connects to broker A and a consumer, C1 that subscribes to messages from P connects to broker B. The network TTL is equal to 2, so two alternative routes are possible:

Figure 17. Duplicate Subscriptions in a Network

If you set decreaseNetworkConsumerPriority to true, the short route is preferred. and messages are propagated along the route PABC1. However, under heavy load conditions, the short route, PABC1, can become overloaded and in this case the broker, A, will fall back to the long route, PACBC1. The problem with this scenario is that when the consumer, C1, shuts down, it can lead to messages getting stuck on broker C.

Setting suppressDuplicateQueueSubscriptions attribute to true will suppress the intermediary subscriptions that are generated between A and B. Because this subscription is suppressed the only route left is PACC1. Routing becomes fully deterministic.