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

Motivation

Currently, in KafkaConsumer, the In KAFKA-4879, we first noticed that KafkaConsumer will hang forever when deleting a topic. However, after looking closer, we have found that in general the position(TopicPartition topicPartition) method will continue to block indefinitely unless the offsets are retrieved for the provided TopicPartition.  To avoid this scenario from occurring, a TimeoutException will be thrown once the amount of time spent exceeds requestTimeoutMs which is a  user-configured variable.

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