How to Quickly Resend Messages in RocketMQ to Diagnose Consumer Failures

RocketMQ consumer failures often trigger long retry intervals, especially when using the HTTP protocol, making it hard to pinpoint system issues. To accelerate diagnosis, you can manually resend messages through the RocketMQ console.

What is RocketMQ?

RocketMQ, Alibaba Cloud's managed version of Apache RocketMQ, offers low‑latency, high‑concurrency, highly available distributed messaging for events and streams. It has been in production for over a decade, handling trillion‑level data spikes during major sales events.

Asynchronous Decoupling

Message queues decouple producers and consumers, allowing asynchronous processing.

Message Retry Mechanism

If a consumer fails to process a message or times out, RocketMQ automatically retries delivery according to its retry policy.

Key points

All retry attempts retain the same Message ID.

Retries only apply to cluster consumption mode; broadcast mode does not retry failed messages.

Retry Strategy Details

When a consumer fails, RocketMQ waits for a configured retry interval before redelivering the message. After reaching the maximum retry count, the message is moved to a dead‑letter queue, where it can be inspected to recover business logic.

Retry behavior includes:

Retry interval : time between a failed attempt and the next delivery.

Maximum retry count : how many times the system will redeliver the message.

HTTP and TCP protocols have different default intervals and limits; the following steps focus on the HTTP retry policy.

HTTP Protocol Retry Policy

(Illustrative diagram omitted for brevity.)

Manually Resending a Message

Step 1. Locate the Target Topic

(Screenshot showing topic list.)

Step 2. Open "Quick Experience" for the Topic

(Screenshot of the quick‑experience button.)

Step 3. Use the Quick‑Experience Interface to Produce and Consume a Message

(Screenshot of the message production UI.)

Message content : the JSON payload you want to send.

{
    "userCode": "20241111111100000001",
    "certificateType": "ID_CARD",
    "remark": null,
    "certificateName": "阿克苏",
    "certificateNo": "xxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
    "force": false,
    "auditStatus": 1
}

Message key : the message ID.

Message tag : the associated tag for routing.

After filling in the details, click Send to immediately trigger consumption, enabling rapid resolution of system anomalies.

(Final screenshot of the send confirmation.)