Kafka max.poll.interval.ms: Slow Consumers Kicked Out

In this chapter

Slow work must not stop polling

What breaks

A consumer spends 12 minutes per batch. The limit is 5 minutes, so the group kicks it out and another worker repeats the jobs.

Three ways to respond

• Commit right after poll: A crash loses unfinished jobs.
• Small batches, keep polling, commit what’s done: Stays in the group. No lost work. (the fix)
• Set the limit to one day: A dead worker takes a day to notice.

The fix: Small batches, keep polling, commit what’s done

A consumer must call poll() within max.poll.interval.ms. Use smaller batches or pause/resume, and commit only completed offsets.

Remember: Keep polling. Commit only finished work.

More on Consumers problems

• Kafka Simulator: Producers, Partitions and Consumer Groups
• How Uber, Netflix and Zomato Use Kafka: Real Architectures
• Kafka Interview Questions: 26 Real Production Problems
• Kafka vs a Message Queue: Why Events Stay After Reading
• Kafka Topics vs Partitions and Message Keys Explained
• Kafka Producer Batching: Async Send, linger.ms, batch.size
• Event-Driven Architecture with Kafka: Drop Sync Calls
• Kafka Fan-Out: One Event, Many Consumer Groups

Keep learning

• Previous: Kafka Rack Awareness: Replicas Across Zones
• Next: Kafka Monitoring: Alert on Lag Time, Not Message Count
• All Kafka tutorial chapters

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