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The consumer (Fetcher) delays decompression until the records are returned to the user, but because of max.poll.records, it may end up holding onto the decompressed data from a single partition for a few iterations. Therefore buffer.memory is not a hard bound constraint on the consumer's memory usage as mentioned in the setting's description.

Similarly to KIP-72, metrics about the MemoryPool (usage, free space, etc) will be exposed by the Consumer

Compatibility, Deprecation, and Migration Plan

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