Should I use transactions

You often have to choose between how you consume messages. The choices are

1. auto-acknowledgement
2. explicit acknowledgement via Message.acknowledge()
3. JMS transactions
4. XA

For a discussion on XA try Should I use XA

The main difference between 1 & 2 and 3 & 4 is the latter allow things to be rolled back and redelivered if there is a failure while processing. There is no JMS 'unacknowledge'. So for this reason JMS transactions should be preferred to message acknowledgements in most use cases.

Incidentally, its a common misconception that transactions are slow; there's no real difference between a JMS transaction and a Message.acknowledge() from an architectural perspective in ActiveMQ; the only real issue is whether you are using persistent messaging and so must block until the commit is synchronized to disk (much the same way you must block with a Message.acknowledge() in a non-transactional JMS session). Note that transactions are available in non-persistent modes too - which are very lightweight and mostly client-side facades only.

Its also worth noting that if you are using persistent messaging, the fastest way of using JMS is to actually use transactions and use batching; so you can send 1000 messages, all of which are asynchronous and super fast, then do one commit ever batch to minimise the latency involved with waiting for things to be synced to disk. (The same is tru e for consuming or mixed consume and produces etc).