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Discussion thread: DISCUSS KIP-1052 

JIRA: KAFKA-17645

Motivation

When analyzing performance of long-running applications like Kafka, it is useful to separate the application's lifecycle into phases such as initialization, steady-state, transient-states due to changes in system load, and shut-down. Of these states, steady-state and transient-response-states are of special interest since these represent the normal operating states of the application. To measure the steady state performance of Kafka, one would typically set up a cluster, then create topics and proceed to measure the performance of various load points on their cluster. 
 
A problem arises, however, when using the producer performance test to measure steady-state performance. In our observations, the producer performance test has high latency during the initialization phase as producers are coming online and brokers are beginning to exchange replicated messages. Currently, all measurements with the producer performance test will include measurements of the high latency that occurs during startup in any evaluation of steady-state performance, especially when test durations are not sufficiently long. 

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