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The old consumer based group management allows for explicitly deleting a consumer group. This functionality is missing in the new consumer based group management where offsets are stored in a Kafka internal topic. The only way a consumer group can be removed is when its offsets are expired. The default retention time for committed offsets is currently 1 day (KIP-186 aims to increase that to 7 days). The override for this retention time is through the CommitOffsetOffsetCommit API. Therefore, the offset cache can easily expand for consumer groups that are just waiting for their offsets to expire. With KIP-211 that proposes removing the retention_time field from the CommitOffset OffsetCommit API, the need for an alternate group deletion mechanism is more eminent than ever.

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