I ran a quick test with the persistent flag set to true and another one with the flag set to false. In both the cases, I have the consumers subscribed as durable. I publish messages to the topic while the clients are up and while they are down. In both the cases, when the clients come back up, they get all the messages. At this point, I also did the same by stopping the clients, publishing data and stopping and starting the server. Again, when the clients come back up, they get all the messages. This happens irrespective of if the persistent flag is set to true or false. Does that mean that the persistent is only for the producers to make sure that the message got to the broker?
Thanks, Ramesh.