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Please keep the discussion on the mailing list rather than commenting on the wiki (wiki discussions get unwieldy fast).

Motivation

Current KafkaProducer.close() method will try to finish sending all pending messages before it returns. There are several multivations to add a close method with timeout in the producer.

1. Sometimes, user will want to close a producer wiithin a bounded time to avoid blocking on producer.close() for too long.
2. One specific use case of 1) is that in some scenarios, user will want to close the produce immediately and fail all the unsent messages in RecordAccumulator. (e.g. to preserve order if a send failed).

Current KafkaProducer.close() method will try to send those messages before it returns. So we need to provide an interface that allow user to choose to close producer in which way.

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