Ack All

Overview

ack_all_queue_messages acknowledges every pending message on a channel in a single broker-side call, without receiving them first. Reach for it when you want to drain a queue rather than process it — clearing a backlog of stale work after a bad deploy, resetting a channel between test runs, or discarding messages that are no longer relevant — where pulling and acking each message individually would be slow and wasteful.

Because it settles the whole channel at once, it is far cheaper than a receive-then-ack loop: the broker confirms all in-flight messages atomically and reports how many were affected via wait_time_seconds, which bounds how long it waits for in-flight transactions to settle before counting.

Gotchas: this is a blunt, irreversible instrument — it acknowledges all currently-pending messages, not a selected subset, so anything unprocessed is discarded, not redelivered. A busy channel may need a larger wait_time_seconds value to catch messages still landing. For routine, per-message cleanup use ordinary acks, an expiration policy, or a dead-letter policy instead — save ack-all for deliberate, wholesale purges.

Prerequisites

• KubeMQ server running on localhost:50000
• Python SDK installed (pip install kubemq)

Code

"""Example: Ack all — acknowledge all pending messages in a queue at once."""

from __future__ import annotations

import asyncio

from kubemq import AsyncQueuesClient
from kubemq import QueueMessage


async def main() -> None:
    async with AsyncQueuesClient(
        address="localhost:50000",
        client_id="python-queues-ack-all-client",
    ) as client:
        # Send multiple messages
        for i in range(10):
            await client.send_queue_message(
                QueueMessage(
                    channel="python-queues.ack-all",
                    body=f"Msg-{i + 1}".encode(),
                )
            )
        print("Sent 10 messages")

        # Acknowledge all pending messages at once
        acked = await client.ack_all_queue_messages(
            "python-queues.ack-all", wait_time_seconds=5
        )
        print(f"Acknowledged {acked} messages")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

How It Works

• ack_all_queue_messages sends a single bulk-acknowledge command to the broker, atomically acknowledging all pending messages in the channel.
• The wait_time_seconds argument controls how long the broker waits for in-flight messages to be included before executing the bulk ack.
• The return value is the count of messages that were acknowledged; it can be zero if no messages were pending.
• Bulk ack is more efficient than calling async_ack() per message when you need to drain a queue unconditionally.

Related

• Pattern overview
• Python SDK Reference
• Send & Receive
• Ack & Reject