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JIRA:

Motivation

In production, producers commonly send keyed messages to leverage semantic partitioning for ordering guarantees, stream joins, and cross-cluster replication. However, kafka-producer-perf-test is the standard tool for benchmarking Kafka producer throughput and latency. However, it currently always creates records with a null key, which means all messages are distributed across partitions via round-robin.In production workloads, producers commonly send messages with keys to leverage semantic partitioning — ensuring that records with the same key always land on the same partition always produces records with null keys, making benchmark results systematically optimistic and unable to reflect the performance characteristics of real keyed workloads.

This proposal adds key distribution support to kafka-producer-perf-test, allowing engineers to benchmark keyed workloads with configurable key ranges and distribution strategies.

Public Interfaces

This proposal adds two new command-line arguments to kafka-producer-perf-test:

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