# Flow Control in the Absence of Consumers

The server enforces flow control on destinations regardless of the presence of consumers.

Note: Prior to release 8.4, if there was no message consumer for a destination, the server would not enforce flow control for the destination. That is, if a queue had no started receiver, the server did not enforce flow control for that queue. Also, if a topic had inactive durable subscriptions or no current subscriber, the server did not enforce flow control for that topic. For topics, if flow control was set on a specific topic (for example, `foo.bar`), then flow control was enforced as long as there were subscribers to that topic or any parent topic (for example, if there were subscribers to `foo.*`).

This behavior can be restored by setting the `flow_control_only_with_active_consumer` property but note that this property and the corresponding behavior are deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

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