[zeromq-dev] Truncated publish messages

[McMillan, Scott A]

Hi,

I'm successfully using pub-sub (CZMQ 3.0.0-rc1 and ZMQ 4.0.5), but I'm
observing the following problem.

My publisher can sometimes be a short-lived program that does something,
publishes the data, then closes the socket and exits the program.  If the
data is sufficiently large*, I can see the published data get truncated on
the wire with tcpdump (the data is segmented into multiple wire packets
and I see the first few but not the end).

My hypothesis is that closing the socket and exiting the program kills the
ZMQ I/O thread halfway through the send.  The following observations
support the hypothesis, 1) if the program publishes a short message after
the long one, both are received at the subscriber and 2) if I make the
program sleep for a bit before closing the socket and exiting, the data is
received at the subscriber. Unfortunately, neither of these is a very
reliable solution.

If I understand the documentation correctly, ZMQ_LINGER will not help
because the program itself exits.

Is there a way to query the I/O thread to get the number of pending
messages?  I haven't found such a method in the documentation, but I have
just missed it.  If so, I could just poll that and only exit when there
are no pending messages.

Or is the only reliable method to have the subscriber send an ack and not
let the publisher exit until it receives the ack?

Thanks,
Scott

* 100KB will consistently reproduce the issue.