I have a new Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM and I decided to install the latest release of IBM MQ on it. The current available release of IBM MQ is v9.2.1 CD.
If you want to try out IBM MQ on Raspberry Pi then just follow the instructions on this page. The instructions are pretty straight forward. The only thing that is different from installing IBM MQ on SLES or RHEL versus Raspberry Pi, is that you do not create the ‘mqm’ group and ‘mqm’ UserId. The command
sudo apt install "ibmmq-*"
will do it for you. The only odd thing about this, is that the install command puts ‘mqm’ home directory as ‘/var/mqm/’ rather than ‘/home/mqm/’. I guess I should send an email to some of the MQ people at IBM Hursley UK to find out why they chose to do this or maybe it was a typo. I prefer to have all of my user home directories to be under ‘/home/’ directory.
Anyway, I installed IBM MQ v9.2.1 CD and created 2 queue managers.
Here’s an image from MQ Explorer on Windows 10 showing the 2 Raspberry Pi queue managers:
MQ Visual Edit v3.1.0 has a new MQ Tool called: Ping Queue Manager. The Ping Queue Manager tool will test connectivity, opening, closing of a queue and putting AND getting a series of messages to/from a queue of a queue manager.
Just for the fun of it, I was curious how fast a Raspberry Pi queue manager could handle the ping test.
Here’s the results of a ping test against a Raspberry Pi queue manager using 1Gb Ethernet connection (not WiFi):
Here’s the results of a ping test against a SLES 12 SP3 64-bit queue manager (MQ v9.1.0) using 1Gb Ethernet connection:
So, if we look at the results of putting and getting 10,000 messages we see:
- Raspberry Pi queue manager did 10,000 in 6.0336745 seconds. That is 1657.4 message per second.
- SLES 12 SP3 64-bit queue manager did 10,000 in 4.7326066 seconds. That is 2113 message per second.
So, the Raspberry Pi queue manager will not set a record for speed but at roughly 1657 messages per second, it is impressive. 🙂 Note: If you use a WiFi connection to the Raspberry Pi then expect a much slower message rate.
Note: I have not over-clocked my Raspberry Pi 4 yet. I put the 3 heat-sinks on the Raspberry Pi motherboard and installed the fan on the case, So, it should easily handle over-clocking without over heating. 🙂
Because of the pandemic and people (and students) working from home, I wonder how many people are using a Raspberry Pi 4 as their computer. If people were looking for a cheap computer like a Chromebook then they really should be thinking about getting a Raspberry Pi 4. In case you didn’t know, there is now a product called Raspberry Pi 400. It is a keyboard with a built-in Raspberry Pi. It reminds me of the Commodore 64 from the 80’s. (Ok, I think I’m dating myself!!) If you get the Raspberry Pi 400 Kit then all you need to add is a monitor (that supports HDMI).
I’ll be writing more about Raspberry Pi and IBM MQ in the coming days. 🙂
Regards,
Roger Lacroix
Capitalware Inc.
