How to handle RabbitMQ with mobile apps

Question

I am looking to implement rabbitmq on google compute engine to handle messages on my android and ios messaging app. I have heard that rabbitmq can be quite power hungry, so i am wondering what the best solution to combat this is? Do i use a different protocol like MQTT or so i use something like GCM to handle the connection to and from the apps and let rabbitmq just handle queuing the messages?

Answer 1

You would never want make a direct connection from mobile device to your RabbitMQ server, especially if the app on the device is a consumer. RabbitMQ consumers have to poll RabbitMQ continuously to check if there are messages pending for them. You would want a web-server to handle actual HTTP POST/GET of messages from devices. The webserver will do two things:

1. Save the message to DB (along with the source and intended destination info)

2. queue APN/GCM push messages to a RabbitMQ (the broker here) exchange

   you will need to build a daemon to monitor RabbitMQ for these push messages that have been queued. The daemon's sole task would be to connect or maintain a connection to Apple's or Google's push messaging services and notify your apps that they have a message pending. If a device is notified of a pending message, it contacts the webserver to consume the message