Removing Stacked Messages - the quick way

Situation

Yesterday I was asked to remove over 4,000,000 messages waiting to enter Rhapsody on a database communication point on a development server.  On a low specification development server the number of messages were causing the Rhapsody service major issues, for example a failure of the connection to the Rhapsody IDE which was restored by a restart of the Rhapsody service. 

In the past high message numbers had been manually removed from the Rhapsody Management Console.  It can take a long time to get the messages to display in management console so this is not a quick solution.

Memories of Rhapsody version 2

Rhapsody version 2, where I began, contained a tool to remove message from the Rhapsody routes and communication points.  This has long gone a few major versions ago.  I always found this tool useful. 

Solution

My solution was quick and simple taking less than 2 min to remove the four million messages. 

1. Duplicate the effected communication point in the Rhapsody Workspace by dragging the communication point to folder level with Ctrl pressed, you know this.  The communication point appears in the workspace post fixed with a 2. 
2. Delete the original communication point from the Rhapsody workspace. Message associated with the deleted communication point will be removed from the achieve at the next clean-up.   
3. I manually ran the Rhapsody Achieve Clean-up, contained in the Management menu, to remove any messages from the Rhapsody Achieve.

 Advice

In this case we were testing to find the optimum through put for bulk loading messages into a downstream system to create a PMI.  It was predicable that we would get issue of this type.  With hindsight I would configure Rhapsody Notifications and Watchlists even on a development server when the probability is high of issues.  Most solutions will have Rhapsody Watchlists created as part of the development cycle.   

A little effort can save a lot of time!