I've now been involved in two projects where I would have needed a queue with following characteristics: - simple pub-sub, queue-like: m producers, n consumers - decent performance (order of hundreds of requests per second) - high availability for message persistence (I don't want to loose messages) - no strict FIFO needed, just some kind of lesser fairness (newer items should not block older ones from passing through)

ActiveMQ with active-backup setup over shared disk mount is the current choice, and the start-up is really slow if the queue has a lot of data.

RabbitMQ does not persist messages in HA fashion, so I've ignored it so far. Maybe HornetQ needs some attention.

I see a lot of flexibility and feature-richness in the queue landscape and it perplexes me that getting this simple combination of basics right is so difficult.