Delivering Billions of Messages Exactly Once
"Exactly once" model of message is theoretically impossible to do in distributed environment with nonzero possibility of failure. If you haven't received acknowledgement from the other side of communication in the specified amount of time you can only do one of two things:<p>1) do nothing, risking message loss<p>2) retransmit, risking duplication<p>But of course that's only from messaging system point of view. Deduplication at receiver end can help reduce problem, but itself can fail (there is no foolproof way of implementing that pseudocode's "has_seen(message.id)" method)