"genman" wrote : What I did for JBoss MQ is schedule a timeout to occur for all expiring messages, similar to the scheduled message feature, which does the move/removal. | | There are some scalability issues with doing that. Namely, every soon and not-so-soon expired message ID is kept in memory on a heap. It'd be better if the expiry date was kept as a separate column in the DB, and indexed, to assist in finding these messages without having to scan them all. Yes, I thought about this too. It would be the easiest solution to implement, but as you mention too, I think it has scalability issues. I am thinking along the lines of a expirer thread that periodically scans the queue View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4068336#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...