Critter Stack in Review: message loss fixes, clean shutdown and multi-tenancy
JasperFx shipped 72 tagged releases across Wolverine, Marten and shared libraries between October 12 and 30. The headline theme is a durable inbox and outbox hardening pass that closed about a dozen ways messages could go missing or run twice, much of it driven by community bug reports. For .NET developers running durable messaging, the review also covers performance fixes, cleaner shutdown and multi-tenant Marten changes.
Key points
- Between Wolverine 6.51.3 and 6.58.0, about a dozen ways for durable inbox and outbox messages to be lost, duplicated or stuck were closed.
- Wolverine 6.58.0: when a durable local queue cannot store a batch, the HTTP transport now answers 503 so the sender retries.
- The durable TCP listener answers ProcessingFailure instead of Received for a batch its inbox could not store.
- Wolverine 6.57.0 adds XML serialization for NServiceBus interop.
- Marten's UseTenantPartitionedEvents mode received per-tenant subscription rewind and partition fixes.
- Read the upgrade notes first: the only schema addition is an optional nullable envelope_id column on the deduplication table.
JasperFx's Critter Stack review covers a three-week window in which Wolverine moved from 6.51 to 6.58 and Marten received a number of multi-tenancy improvements. The most important thread is a hardening pass on durable inbox and outbox handling, which closed about a dozen distinct ways a message could be lost, handled twice or left stuck. Most of these came in as community reports that included reproductions, and a new durable receiver compliance test rig was built to find the remaining cases.
Other themes include performance work in SQL Server queries and the run command, cleaner shutdown behaviour, and async daemons that recover from transient failures on their own. One concrete change: since Wolverine 6.58.0, the HTTP transport returns 503 instead of 200 when a durable local queue cannot store an incoming batch, so the sender retries rather than discarding messages. The original post lists the upgrade notes and the remaining fixes.
Real-world use
- An order service that publishes through RabbitMQ or SQS and cannot afford lost or duplicated outbox messages
- A multi-tenant SaaS application storing several customers in one Marten document or event store
- A background worker consuming Kafka or SQS messages that must deduplicate redeliveries through the durable inbox
Why it matters
If you use Wolverine or Marten for durable messaging, these releases close silent loss and double-processing paths. Read the upgrade notes before upgrading and check that your HTTP senders retry on 503 responses.