Doubt about 'Consumer Count' - jboss-console/jms

[everjava]

I don't understand very well what mean the consumer count. In my queue I have the  consumer count = 1

Consumer Count	1	The number of consumers on the queue
Message Count	0	The number of messages in the queue

I found it:

https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/docs/en-US/JBoss_Operations_Network/2.4/html/Resource_Monitoring_and_Operations_Reference/JMS_Manager_Service.html

Consumer Count

measurement

number of consumers currently consuming messages from this queue

It means that there's a consumer consuming the queue(process something) or just listen the queue  ? I'm a bit confused ...

why there are queues with consumer count = 1 and other with consumer count = 0

[ojgarciab]

Consumers are processes/applications/threads waiting for messages. There could be many applications waiting for messages but no messages in queue.

Messages in queue are messages waiting for a consumer to read them. If there were no consumers new messages would be queued.