Azure Service Bus Queues slow to send message

Question

So I'm trying to send a message to an Azure Service Bus Queue from node.js I'm using the boilerplate code as described in the Azure documentation.

var message = {
body: 'Test message',
customProperties: {
    testproperty: 'TestValue'
}};
serviceBusService.sendQueueMessage('myqueue', message, function(error){
if(!error){
    // message sent
}});

When I send a single message every few seconds it works fine and I'm able to see the message get picked up by my worker after a second or so, but once I start sending more messages (5-10 per second) it looks like it starts choking and I see a performance decrease to only sending out a message every 5 - 8 seconds. Is there Any way to increase the performance and keep the FIFO ordering? Could this be an issue of latency since I'm running my node code and my worker locally?

NOTE: I'm using basic non-partitioned queues.

Answer 1

To optimize sending performance of Service Bus, we can leverage client-side batching if your application support asynchronous Send and Complete operations. You can get details on official article https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/service-bus-performance-improvements/#client-side-batching.

However, client using batch to send messages is only integrated in .Net SDK, in Node.js we should implement custom requests via REST API https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn798894.aspx.

To implement custom requests via REST API, we need to create the authentication credentials first on Azure portal:

• Go to Azure Managment Portal, in the menu on the left select "SERVICE BUS".
• Select the Namespace you created.
• On the top menu select QUEUES.
• Select the QUEUE to go to the details screen
• Go to the CONFIGURE tab and go to the section "Shared access policies"
• Create a new policy, enter a name and select the "Send" permission for sending messages
• Save it by pressing the SAVE button at the bottom of the page
• Go to the section "Shared access key generator"
• Select your Policy and copy the PRIMARY KEY
• Save this key, you will use it later

Then you can leverage this code sample to generate the SAS Token for sending batch messages, https://github.com/dx-ted-emea/azure-tessel/blob/master/labs/service-bus-queues/CreateSASToken.js

Here is the code snippet:

var https = require('https');
var crypto = require('crypto');
// ServiceBus parameters
var namespace = '<Your-ServiceBus-Namespace>';
var queue ='<Your-Queue>';
var AccessKeyName = '<Your-AccessKey-Name>';
var AccessKey = '<Your-AccessKey>';
// Full ServiceBus Queue publisher URI

var ServiceBusUri = 'https://' + namespace + '.servicebus.windows.net' + '/' + queue;
function createSASToken(uri, keyName, key) {
                var expiry = parseInt(Date.now()/1000)+3600;
                var signedString = encodeURIComponent(uri) + '\n' + expiry;
                var hmac = crypto.createHmac('sha256', key);
                hmac.update(signedString);
                var signature = hmac.digest('base64');
                var token = 'SharedAccessSignature sr=' + encodeURIComponent(uri) + '&sig=' + encodeURIComponent(signature) + '&se=' + expiry + '&skn=' + keyName;

                return token;
}

var createdSASToken = createSASToken(ServiceBusUri, AccessKeyName, AccessKey);
var options = {
                hostname: namespace + '.' + 'servicebus.Windows.net',
                port: 443,
                path: '/' + queue + '/messages',
                method: 'POST',
                headers: {
                                'Authorization': createdSASToken,
                                'Content-Type': 'application/vnd.microsoft.servicebus.json',
                }
};
var req = https.request(options, function(res) {
                console.log("SendMessageInQueue:statusCode: ", res.statusCode);
                res.setEncoding('utf8');
                res.on('data', function(d) {
                });
});
req.on('error', function(e) {
                console.error(e);
});
var messages = [{
                "Body": "This is the first message"
}, {
                "Body": "This is the second message"
}, {
                "Body": "This is the third message"
}];
req.write(JSON.stringify(messages));
req.end();

This solution is based on https://github.com/dx-ted-emea/azure-tessel/tree/master/labs/service-bus-queues.