ZeroMQ

Last Value Caching

If you’ve used commercial publish-subscribe systems, you may be used to some features that are missing in the fast and cheerful ØMQ pub-sub model. One of these is last value caching (LVC). This solves the problem of how a new subscriber catches up when it joins the network. The theory is that publishers get notified when a new subscriber joins and subscribes to some specific topics. The publisher can then rebroadcast the last message for those topics.

I’ve already explained why publishers don’t get notified when there are new subscribers: in large pub-sub systems the volumes of data make it pretty much impossible. To make really large-scale pub-sub networks work, you need a protocol like PGM that exploits an upscale Ethernet switch’s ability to multicast data to thousands of subscribers. Trying to do a TCP unicast from the publisher to each of thousands of subscribers just doesn’t scale. You get weird spikes, unfair distribution (some subscribers getting the message before others), network congestion, and general unhappiness.

PGM is a one-way protocol: the publisher sends a message to a multicast address at the switch, which then rebroadcasts that to all interested subscribers. The publisher never sees when subscribers join or leave: this all happens in the switch, which we don’t really want to start reprogramming.

However, in a lower-volume network with a few dozen subscribers and a limited number of topics we can use TCP, and then the XSUB and XPUB ...