I have a situation where I have a single activemq broker with 2 queues, Q1 and Q2. I have two ruby-based consumers using activemessaging. Let's call them C1 and C2. Both consumers subscribe to each queue. I'm setting activemq.prefetchSize=1 when subscribing to each queue. I'm also setting ack=client.

Consider the following sequence of events:

1) A message that triggers a long-running job is published to queue Q1. Call this M1.

2) M1 is dispatched to consumer C1, kicking off a long operation.

3) Two messages that trigger short jobs are published to queue Q2. Call these M2 and M3.

4) M2 is dispatched to C2 which quickly runs the short job.

5) M3 is dispatched to C1, even though C1 is still running M1. It's able to dispatch to C1 because prefetchSize=1 is set on the queue subscription, not on the connection. So the fact that a Q1 message has already been dispatched doesn't stop one Q2 message from being dispatched.

Since activemessaging consumers are single-threaded, the net result is that M3 sits and waits on C1 for a long time until C1 finishes processing M1. So, M3 is not processed for a long time, despite the fact that consumer C2 is sitting idle (since it quickly finishes with message M2).

Essentially, whenever a long Q1 job is run and then a whole bunch of short Q2 jobs are created, exactly one of the short Q2 jobs gets stuck on a consumer waiting for the long Q1 job to finish.

Is there a way to set prefetchSize at the connection level rather than at the subscription level? I really don't want any messages dispatched to C1 while it is processing M1. The other alternative is that I could create a consumer dedicated to processing Q1 and then have other consumers dedicated to processing Q2. But, I'd rather not do that since Q1 messages are infrequent--Q1's dedicated consumers would sit idle most of the day tying up memory.