ActiveMQ redelivery plugin fails when client side redelivery is active

We recently had serious issues with the ActiveMQ redelivery plugin. Under high load messages would not be redelivered at all (according to the application logs), they went straight to the DLQ. In isolated tests redelivery worked, but not as intended. We would get six redeliveries in a few milliseconds and then nothing. Why?

It turned out to be a conflict between client-side redelivery and broker redelivery. The client side redelivery kicked in and quickly failed six times. Then when the broker got a chance the maximum redelivery count had already been reached, so the message was moved to the DLQ. See this post.

Following the advice in the post we added jms.redeliveryPolicy.maximumRedeliveries=0 to the broker url, and voila! It worked.