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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 always produces records with null keys, making benchmark results systematically optimistic and unable to reflect the performance characteristics of real keyed workloads. Additionally, since log compaction requires non-null keys, the tool currently cannot benchmark compacted topics at all. Adding key support removes this limitation.

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

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