MQTT - using allowLinkStealing to avoid InvalidClientIDException

[ddewaele <dd...@gmail.com>]

Hi,

We have a number of devices in the field that are connecting to ActiveMQ.
ActiveMQ is setup in a master-slave configuration with a loadbalancer in
front of it. Devices connect through the loadbalancer using the Eclipse Paho
client library.

>From time to time we are receiving the following error (at a certain point
we saw this for all of our clients and we reached a point where not a single
client was able to connect anymore)  :



This seems to happen beyond our control. The events leading up to this on
the clients is the following :

- Client receives a timeout after publishing a message



- Clients becomes disconnected (detected while trying to publish a msg)



- Client tries to reconnect but fails



- At this exact point do we see the javax.jms.InvalidClientIDException on
the ActiveMQ broker.

The documention mentions a property called allowLinkStealing that should be
enabled by default for MQTT transports.
http://activemq.apache.org/configuring-transports.html
However this issue seems to indicate it was not for 5.10.0 :
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AMQ-4719

I was wondering 

- why in the scenario above didn't ActiveMQ remove the connection at the
time the client reported it was disconnected.
- In what situation could this occur ?
- why would we set allowlinkStealing=true for MQTT by default and not for
JMS for example.
- Are there side effects associated with using allowlinkStealing.

The only side-effect I can think of is the following:

Without allowLinkStealing, when a unit is connected to activeMQ with
clientID X, no other unit with the same clientID can connect and that is a
good thing. 

If I allow link stealing, a badly-configured unit in the field (with an
existing clientID) can cause havoc (by stealing the connection from the
valid unit).

But I am interested in finding out why ActiveMQ could end up in this
situation in the first place where it reports this InvalidClientIDException
after the client clearly received a disconnect.

Thanks.



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