Apache ActiveMQ Artemis (like HornetQ beforehand) ships with a high performance journal. Since Apache ActiveMQ Artemis handles its own persistence, rather than relying on a database or other 3rd party persistence engine it is very highly optimised for the specific messaging use cases. The majority of the journal is written in Java, however we abstract out the interaction with the actual file system to allow different pluggable implementations.
Apache ActiveMQ Artemis ships with two implementations:
Java NIO.
The first implementation uses standard Java NIO to interface with the file system. This provides extremely good performance and runs on any platform where there's a Java 6+ runtime.
Linux Asynchronous IO
The second implementation uses a thin native code wrapper to talk to the Linux asynchronous IO library (AIO). With AIO, Apache ActiveMQ Artemis will be called back when the data has made it to disk, allowing us to avoid explicit syncs altogether and simply send back confirmation of completion when AIO informs us that the data has been persisted.
Using AIO will typically provide even better performance than using Java NIO.
The AIO journal is only available when running Linux kernel 2.6 or later and after having installed libaio (if it's not already installed).
Also, please note that AIO will only work with the following file systems: ext2, ext3, ext4, jfs, xfs. With other file systems, e.g. NFS it may appear to work, but it will fall back to a slower synchronous behaviour. Don't put the journal on a NFS share!
One point that should be added is that AIO doesn't work well with encrypted partitions, thus you have to move to NIO on those.
What are the symptoms of an AIO isssue ?
If you see the following exception in your WildFly log file / console
[org.apache.activemq.artemis.core.server] (ServerService Thread Pool -- 64) AMQ222010: Critical IO Error, shutting down the server. file=AIOSequentialFile:/home/wildfly/wildfly-10.0.0.Final/standalone/data/activemq/journal/activemq-data-2.amq, message=Cannot open file:The Argument is invalid: java.io.IOException: Cannot open file:The Argument is invalid at org.apache.activemq.artemis.jlibaio.LibaioContext.open(Native Method)
that means that AIO isn't working properly on your system.
To use NIO instead execute the following commnd using jboss-cli :
/subsystem=messaging-activemq/server=default:write-attribute(name=journal-type, value=NIO)
You need to reload or restart your server and you should see the following trace in your server console :
INFO [org.apache.activemq.artemis.core.server] (ServerService Thread Pool -- 64) AMQ221013: Using NIO Journal
[org.hornetq.core.server] (ServerService Thread Pool -- 64) HQ222010: Critical IO Error, shutting down the server. file=AIOSequentialFile:/home/wildfly/wildfly-9.0.2.Final/standalone/data/messagingjournal/hornetq-data-1.hq, message=Can't open file: HornetQException[errorType=NATIVE_ERROR_CANT_OPEN_CLOSE_FILE message=Can't open file] at org.hornetq.core.libaio.Native.init(Native Method)
that means that AIO isn't working properly on your system.
To use NIO instead execute the following commnd using jboss-cli :
/subsystem=messaging/hornetq-server=default:write-attribute(name=journal-type,value=NIO)
You need to reload or restart your server and you see the following trace in your server console :
INFO [org.hornetq.core.server] (ServerService Thread Pool -- 64) HQ221013: Using NIO Journal