RabbitMQ as MQTT Broker vs "Native" MQTT Broker

[er...@24x8.com]

Are there any "unbiased" benchmarks or articles on the pros/cons of using RabbitMQ for MQTT vs a "native" MQTT broker? (So far, what I've found is written from the perspective of a vendor or developer of an MQTT broker, so you can imagine what conclusion they came to).

We are using RabbitMQ for AMQP and eMQTT for MQTT. We recently enabled the MQTT and MQTT-over-WebSockets plug-ins for RabbitMQ and it works fine. Ideally, we'd like to use RabbitMQ exclusively, for both AMQP and MQTT (especially since we have some cross-protocol traffic, but mostly because we have a lot more experience with RabbitMQ and favor a single solution for two problems vs. two completely different solutions).

I realize that in many ways, the answer to this is "it depends, do your own testing". Understood, and we have and will continue to do that. But what I'm looking for input from others that have tried using RabbitMQ as an MQTT broker, and what experiences you've had. Conceptually, my question is around whether RabbitMQ will ultimately be "as good" as a purpose-built MQTT broker, especially at high message volume and high connections and connect rates.

[V Z]

I found Rabbit MQTT performance lagging significantly that of commercial products (by a lot), and have been reporting it on this forum. Rabbit MQTT performance even lags Rabbit AMQP performance by a lot, but that is if you have very demanding application like we do. In our case even eMQTT would not cut it, and neither would Mosquitto, not even lots of them. Rabbit also lacks certain security features found in Mosquitto and commercial products but they may be closing this gap in 3.7. So, we had to buy MQTT broker from another vendor.

[er...@24x8.com]

I'm curious, what makes your application demanding? High message volume, high number of connections, high number of connection setup/tear-down, something else?

[V Z]

High number of connections (think tens of thousands mobile phones) and high throughput (think stock price updates across a hundred symbols per connection).