[Questions] Clarification on consumer_timeout behavior and Celery channel lifecycle

[jrcastro2]

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Question

Hey everyone!

I’d like to clarify the behavior of consumer_timeout in RabbitMQ channels. If I understand correctly, there’s a periodic check (every 1 minute by default) that verifies if a consumer has exceeded the timeout (default 30 minutes). My assumption is that if a channel remains idle for 30+ minutes, it will be closed—even if there were no messages to ACK. However, the documentation suggests that the timeout only applies when a delivery is awaiting an ACK:

If a consumer does not ack its delivery within the timeout value

So, does this mean that a channel only closes when an unacknowledged message exceeds the timeout, or will it also close if it’s simply inactive with no messages received?

Additionally, when using Celery as a consumer, does the channel stay open as long as the Celery process is running, or is it created only when there are messages to process?

Thanks in advance!

[michaelklishin]

@jrcastro2 your understanding is incorrect. Channels are not closed for being idle.

The relevant doc section is called Delivery Acknowledgement Timeout.

A channel that only has consumers that use automatic acknowledgements, consumers that acknowledge messages reasonably quickly or is only used for publishing will never be closed for inactivity (unless its connection is closed).