Nearly all messaging systems (certainly open source ones) hold either a copy of a persistent message or a reference to a persisted message in memory. This is primarily to try and improve performance, but it also can significantly decrease the complexity of implementation. In fact ActiveMQ version 4 and below worked this - way - by holding references to persisted messages in memory.

However there is a limitation to this approach, no matter how much memory you have at your disposal, you will hit a limit to the number persistent messages a broker can handle at any particular time.

To get around this limitation, ActiveMQ introduced a paging cache - for all message stores (except the memory store) to get the best of both worlds - great performance and the ability to hold 100s of millions of messages in persistent store. ActiveMQ is not limited by memory availability, but by the size of the disk available to hold the persistent messages.

For more information see: Message Cursors