php - Does RabbitMQ call the callback function for a consumer when it has some message for it?

Question

Does RabbitMQ call the callback function for a consumer when it has some message for it, or does the consumer have to poll the RabbitMQ client?

So on the consumer side, if there is a PHP script, can RabbitMQ call it and pass the message/parameters to it. e.g. if rating is submitted on shard 1 and the aggregateRating table is on shard 2, then would RabbitMQ consumer on shard 2 trigger the script say aggRating.php and pass the parameters that were inserted in shard 1?

Answer 1

The AMQPQueue::consume method is now a "proper" implementation of basic.consume as of version 1.0 of the PHP AMQP library (http://www.php.net/manual/en/amqpqueue.consume.php). Unfortunately, since PHP is a single threaded language, you cant do other things while waiting for a message in the same process space. If you call AMQPQueue::consume and pass it a callback, your entire application will block and wait for the next message to be sent by the broker, at which point it will call the provided callback function. If you want a non blocking method, you will have to use AMQPQueue::get (http://www.php.net/manual/en/amqpqueue.get.php), which will poll the server for a message, and return a boolean FALSE if there is no message.

I disagree with scvatex's suggestion to use a separate language for using a "push" approach to this problem though. PHP is not IO driven, and therefore using a separate language to call a PHP script when a message arrives seems like unnecessary complexity: why not just use AMQPQueue::consume and let the process block (wait for a message), and either put all the logic in the callback or make the callback run a separate PHP script.

We have done the latter at my work as a large scale job processing system so that we can segregate errors and keep the parent job processor running no matter what happens in the children. If you would like a detailed description of how we set this up and some code samples, I would be more than happy to post them.