Spring JMS - Exponential message re-delivery policy is ignored

Question

We're trying to set a re-delivery policy for ActiveMQ using spring jms. We've set an exponential back-off for the re-deliveries, but it seems to be ignored - the intervals between the message re-deliveries are fixed instead of exponentially growing.

Does anyone know what might be the problem? This is our spring-jms configuration:

<bean id="connectionFactory" class="org.apache.activemq.ActiveMQConnectionFactory"
    p:brokerURL="${activemq_url}">
    <property name="redeliveryPolicy" ref="redeliveryPolicy" />
</bean>

<bean id="redeliveryPolicy" class="org.apache.activemq.RedeliveryPolicy">
    <property name="queue" value="*" />
    <property name="initialRedeliveryDelay" value="10000" />
    <property name="redeliveryDelay" value="10000" />
    <property name="maximumRedeliveries" value="-1" />
    <property name="useExponentialBackOff" value="true" />
    <property name="backOffMultiplier" value="5" />
</bean>

<bean id="cachingConnectionFactory" class="org.springframework.jms.connection.CachingConnectionFactory" 
    p:targetConnectionFactory-ref="connectionFactory" p:sessionCacheSize="10" 
    />

<!-- A JmsTemplate instance that uses the cached connection and destination -->
<bean id="jmsTemplate" class="org.springframework.jms.core.JmsTemplate">
    <property name="connectionFactory" ref="cachingConnectionFactory" />
    <property name="messageConverter" ref="messageConverter" />
    <property name="sessionTransacted" value="true" />
</bean>

<!-- The Spring message listener container configuration -->
<jms:listener-container container-type="default"
    destination-type="queue" connection-factory="connectionFactory"
    acknowledge="transacted" concurrency="1" cache="consumer">
    <jms:listener destination="testQueue" ref="testService"
        method="onMessage" />
</jms:listener-container>

Thanks!

EDIT: This is a log example, the re-deliveries happen every 5 seconds:

11 May 2014 18:52:00  WARN DefaultMessageListenerContainer - Execution of JMS message listener failed, and no ErrorHandler has been set.
javax.jms.JMSException: Sun May 11 18:52:00 IDT 2014
at ...
11 May 2014 18:52:05  WARN DefaultMessageListenerContainer - Execution of JMS message listener failed, and no ErrorHandler has been set.
javax.jms.JMSException: Sun May 11 18:52:05 IDT 2014
at ...
11 May 2014 18:52:10  WARN DefaultMessageListenerContainer - Execution of JMS message listener failed, and no ErrorHandler has been set.
javax.jms.JMSException: Sun May 11 18:52:10 IDT 2014
at ...
11 May 2014 18:52:15  WARN DefaultMessageListenerContainer - Execution of JMS message listener failed, and no ErrorHandler has been set.
javax.jms.JMSException: Sun May 11 18:52:15 IDT 2014
at ...
11 May 2014 18:52:20  WARN DefaultMessageListenerContainer - Execution of JMS message listener failed, and no ErrorHandler has been set.
javax.jms.JMSException: Sun May 11 18:52:20 IDT 2014
at ...

Answer 1

So, I think I found the problem: When I was testing the policy before, I threw JMSException to get the messages to be re-delivered.

One I changed the exception that was thrown to Exception/RuntimeException, the exponential back off worked.

I'm not sure why JMSException causes the exponential back off policy to be ignored...Does anyone have any ideas?