Is it possible to lose messages using MSMQ MessageQueue.Peek with a timeout?

Question

I am currently having an issue of losing a message. This error occurs rarely, but happens often enough to be annoying. Here is the context of the issue:

• I have turned on the message journal on goldmine_service_queue, a MSMQ on Windows 2003 server.
• I can prove that the message is being inserted into goldmine_service_queue since the message appears in the message journal. This information gives timing information about when the message disappeared.
• The logging functions use http://logging.apache.org/log4net/index.html
• The logs do not show errors.
• The worker function(shown below) executes within a thread of a Windows service. It is responsible for peeking at messages(work items) from the queue and processing them.
• From the logs, I strongly suspect that my issue might relate to MessageQueue.Peek and time out behavior.

Is it possible for the timeout and message receive to occur at the same time? Is there a better way for me to handle service stop checking to help avoid this error?

        private void workerFunction()
    {

        logger.Info("Connecting to queue: " + Settings.Default.goldmine_service_queue);
        MessageQueue q = new MessageQueue(Settings.Default.goldmine_service_queue);
        q.Formatter = new ActiveXMessageFormatter();

        while (serviceStarted)
        {

            Message currentMessage = null;

            try
            {
                currentMessage = q.Peek(new TimeSpan(0,0,30));
            }
            catch (System.Messaging.MessageQueueException mqEx)
            {
                if (mqEx.ToString().Contains("Timeout for the requested operation has expired"))
                {
                    logger.Info("Check for service stop request");
                }
                else
                {
                    logger.Error("Exception while peeking into MSMQ: " + mqEx.ToString());
                }
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                logger.Error("Exception while peeking into MSMQ: " + e.ToString());
            }

            if (currentMessage != null)
            {

                logger.Info(currentMessage.Body.ToString());
                try
                {
                    ProcessMessage(currentMessage);
                }
                catch (Exception processMessageException)
                {
                    logger.Error("Error in process message: " + processMessageException.ToString());
                }

                //Remove message from queue.
                logger.Info("Message removed from queue.");
                q.Receive();
                //logPerformance(ref transCount, ref startTime);
            }


        }//end while

        Thread.CurrentThread.Abort();

    }

Answer 1

I don't think any messages should be missed based on a quick review, but you are working in a very odd way with lots of scope for race conditions.

Why not just receive the message and pass it to ProcessMessage (if ProcessMessage fails, you are performing a read anyway). If you need to handle multiple receivers, then do the receive in an MSMQ transaction so the message is unavailable to other receivers but not removed from the queue until the transaction is committed.

Also, rather than polling the queue, why not do an asynchronous receive and let the thread pool handle the completion (where you must call EndReceive). This saves tying up a thread, and you don't need to special case service shutdown (close the message queue and then call MessageQueue.ClearConnectionCache();).

Also, aborting the thread is a really bad way to exit, just return from the thread's start function.