Is ZeroMQ production ready?

Question

What are your experiences with ZeroMQ as a general purpose messaging middleware?

1. Did you run into any show-stopping bugs or non-obvious \"features\"? E.g. 2.0 was

Answer 1

I am also using ZeroMQ in a "semi-production" environment (prototyping for DARPA). Thus far it has been really excellent for "tying cats together," especially when those cats are written in different languages and live on different machines. The available socket idioms make thinking about a distributed computing problem very straightforward. ZeroMQ's strength is ergonomics: a solid mental model and plentiful language bindings.

Proceed with caution, though, if you are up against hard performance constraints. I'm working on a real-time system and have found that, though ZeroMQ aims to be a high-performance solution, it isn't ready for primetime. I think the architecture that's in place has great potential; it just seems to be hampered by some niggling bugs. I probably should have expected that from a library that has evolved so rapidly, going from 0.0 to 3.0 in a relatively short time. Still, I thought I'd get a drop-in replacement for my own, hand-tooled protocol stack and immediately hit some deal-breakers. If you decide to go with ZeroMQ, just keep in mind that you are working well above the transport layer, and if performance is less-than-desirable there's little you can do about it.

That being said, the chatter on the mailing list and IRC channel is pretty great. The devs seem genuinely interested in building something that's completely state-of-the-art. They love it that their library has buzz and is getting used for serious, interesting things. They're busy people, so don't expect a ton of hand-holding. If you've got a real problem, though, they are eager to know what's going on.

Bottom line: A great Swiss army knife for everyday distributed computing problems. Be cautious if you're looking for bleeding-edge performance; it's at least one major release off. Still, the future is looking great for this project, so use it and support it.