EasyNetQ: Publishing Non-Persistent Messages

In AMQP, buried in the basic.properties object that gets sent along with each published message, there is a delivery_mode setting. You can set it to either ‘persistent’ (1), or ‘non-persistent’ (2). It controls whether a message is persisted to disk or not. In the AMQP spec:

“The server SHOULD respect the persistent property of basic messages and SHOULD make a best-effort to hold persistent basic messages on a reliable storage mechanism.”

Of course it’s pointless setting delivery_mode to ‘persistent’ if you’re not publishing to a durable queue.

By default EasyNetQ sets delivery_mode to persistent (1) when calling IBus.Publish. We make the assumption that people would want this safe behaviour out-of-the-box. However, it does introduce a performance hit, so if you don’t care about losing messages in the case of a server restart you should be able to change this behaviour.

From version 0.26.3, EasyNetQ has a new boolean connection string parameter ‘persistentMessages’. By default it is set to true, but if you don’t need persistent messages, but do need high performance, set it to false:

vas bus = RabbitHutch.CreateBus("host=localhost;persistentMessages=false");

This setting has no effect on the advanced API (IAdvancedBus) where you have access to basic.properties and are free to set delivery_mode on a message by message basis.