Wait for a single RabbitMQ message with a timeout

Question

I\'d like to send a message to a RabbitMQ server and then wait for a reply message (on a \"reply-to\" queue). Of course, I don\'t want to wait forever in case the applicatio

Answer 1

Here's what I ended up doing in the .NET client:

protected byte[] WaitForMessageWithTimeout(string queueName, int timeoutMs)
{
    var consumer = new QueueingBasicConsumer(Channel);
    var tag = Channel.BasicConsume(queueName, true, null, consumer);
    try
    {
        object result;
        if (!consumer.Queue.Dequeue(timeoutMs, out result))
            throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("Timeout ({0} seconds) expired while waiting for an MQ response.", timeoutMs / 1000.0));

        return ((BasicDeliverEventArgs)result).Body;
    }
    finally
    {
        Channel.BasicCancel(tag);
    }
}

Unfortunately, I cannot do the same with py-amqplib, because its basic_consume method does not call the callback unless you call channel.wait() and channel.wait() doesn't support timeouts! This silly limitation (which I keep running into) means that if you never receive another message your thread is frozen forever.