We have a broker running AMQ version 7.8.3 that experienced a slowdown in performance. It is currently configured with ASYNCIO for the journals and journal-datasync off/false. Accompanying the sluggish performance were a number of warning messages of the type:

2022-03-02 08:08:13,961 WARN  [org.apache.activemq.artemis.journal] File activemq-data-7040703.amq still has pending IO before closing it

After chatting with the engineering team about this, we believe it is related to journal compaction.