Rabbitmq: error of the badmatch,error,enoent send_snapshots during RabbitMQ cluster synchronization

Products

• RabbitMQ
• Support Only for OpenSource RabbitMQ
• VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ

Issue/Introduction

When running a clustered RabbitMQ environment using Raft-based features (such as Quorum Queues or Streams), you may observe the following error crash dump in your logs on one or more nodes:

 

2026-06-30 07:53:36.003802+00:00 [error] <xxx> Error in process <xxxx> on node 'rabbit@upstream-server-3...' with exit value:
2026-06-30 07:53:36.003802+00:00 [error] <xxx> {{badmatch,{error,enoent}},
2026-06-30 07:53:36.003802+00:00 [error] <xxx>  [{ra_server_proc,send_snapshots,8,
2026-06-30 07:53:36.003802+00:00 [error] <xxx>                   [{file,"src/ra_server_proc.erl"},{line,1882}]},
2026-06-30 07:53:36.003802+00:00 [error] <xxx>   {ra_server_proc,'-handle_effect/5-fun-1-',8,
2026-06-30 07:53:36.003802+00:00 [error] <xxx>                   [{file,"src/ra_server_proc.erl"},{line,1521}]}]}

This error may appear on a healthy node shortly after a different node in the cluster is restarted, or during periods of heavy queue replication activity.

Cause

This error does not indicate a permanent Raft (RA) synchronization failure or cluster corruption.

It is a transient error caused by a timing race condition inherent to normal cluster operations. The Erlang error code enoent translates to "Error No Entity" (File Not Found).

Resolution

It is a transient error and it can be ignored and in fact in more recent versions it will be logged less scarily