RabbitMQ and message priority

Question

Does RabbitMQ have any concept of message priority? I have an issue were some more important messages are being slowed down due to less important messages sitting before it

Answer 1

Rabbit has no concept of priority other than, as Brian succinctly puts it, the one in front gets there first. ;-)

I would suggest implementing a set of queues that serve to service your particular messaging need and have these queues model your prioritisation need by, say, calling them 'MyQueueP1', 'MyQueueP2' and so on and then have our consumer(s) check P1 before P2 (etc.) and service messages from there first.

If you then have a message that is high priority you would publish it to the appropriate priority queue by way of a suitable routing key and voila.

[update] Check this question: In a FIFO Qeueing system, what's the best way the to implement priority messaging

[update] As per recent RabbitMQ release 3.5.0 this answer is now outdated and should be considered valid for only versions prior to this release. https://stackoverflow.com/a/29068288/489888