An installation has two sites – an active site and a passive site. Each site has shared-nothing replication between the active and passive brokers on that site, and there is asynchronous, two-way mirroring between the sites. Both the active and the passive brokers are capable of mirroring; we rely on the internal logic of AMQ to know not to try to mirror the passive brokers (which would create a loop).

On the active site, messages are produced to the active broker at a rate of about 200 per second. Each messages is a few kB in size. There are no consumers, on any broker. Paging takes effect at some point after the start of the test.

Eventually the passive broker on the active site fails, because of file descriptor exhaustion. It takes more than an hour for this to happen. The number of open file descriptors rises on the passive broker very sharply at this point.

In the failing test, we see about 800,000 file descriptors referencing .page files.