RabbitMQ broken pipe error or lost messages

Question

Using the pika library's BlockingConnection to connect to RabbitMQ, I occasionally get an error when publishing messages:

Fatal Socket Error: error(32, 'Broken pipe')

This is from a very simple sub-process that takes some information out of an in-memory queue and sends a small JSON message into AMQP. The error only seems to come up when the system hasn't sent any messages for a few minutes.

Setup:

connection = pika.BlockingConnection(parameters)
channel = self.connection.channel()
channel.exchange_declare(
    exchange='xyz',
    exchange_type='fanout',
    passive=False,
    durable=True,
    auto_delete=False
)

Enqueue code catches any connection errors and retries:

def _enqueue(self, message_id, data):
    try:
        published = self.channel.basic_publish(
            self.amqp_exchange,
            self.amqp_routing_key,
            json.dumps(data),
            pika.BasicProperties(
                content_type="application/json",
                delivery_mode=2,
                message_id=message_id
            )
        )

        # Confirm delivery or retry
        if published:
            self.retry_count = 0
        else:
            raise EnqueueException("Message publish not confirmed.")

    except (EnqueueException, pika.exceptions.AMQPChannelError, pika.exceptions.AMQPConnectionError,
            pika.exceptions.ChannelClosed, pika.exceptions.ConnectionClosed, pika.exceptions.UnexpectedFrameError,
            pika.exceptions.UnroutableError, socket.timeout) as e:
        self.retry_count += 1
        if self.retry_count < 5:
            logging.warning("Reconnecting and resending")
            if self.connection.is_open:
                self.connection.close()
            self.connect()
            self._enqueue(message_id, data)
        else:
            raise e

This sometimes works on the second attempt. It often hangs for a while or just throws away messages before eventually throwing an exception (possibly related bug report). Since it only happens when the system is quiet for a few minutes I'm guessing it's due to a connection timeout. But AMQP has a heartbeat system and pika reportedly uses it (related bug report).

Why do I get this error or lose messages, and why won't the connection stay open when not in use?

Answer 1

From another bug report:

As BlockingConnection doesn't handle heartbeats in the background and the heartbeat_interval can't override the servers suggested heartbeat interval (that's a bug too), i suggest that heartbeats should be disabled by default (rely on TCP keep-alive instead).

If processing a task in a consume block takes longer time then the server suggested heartbeat interval, the connection will be closed by the server and the client won't be able to ack the message when it's done processing.

An update in v1.0.0 may help with the issue.

So I implemented a workaround. Every 30 seconds I publish a heartbeat message through the queue. This keeps the connection open and has the added benefit of confirming to clients that my application is up and running.