FAQ

Producers

Why do I get QueueFullException in my producer when running in async mode?

This typically happens when the producer is trying to send messages quicker than the broker can handle. If the producer can't block, one will have to add enough brokers so that they jointly can handle the load. If the producer can block, one can set queue.enqueueTimeout.ms in producer config to -1. This way, if the queue is full, the producer will block instead of dropping messages.

Consumers

Why does my consumer get InvalidMessageSizeException?

This typically means that the "fetch size" of the consumer is too small. Each time the consumer pulls data from the broker, it reads bytes up to a configured limit. If that limit is smaller than the largest single message stored in Kafka, the consumer can't decode the message properly and will throw an InvalidMessageSizeException. To fix this, increase the limit by setting the property "fetch.size" properly in config/consumer.properties. The default fetch.size is 300,000 bytes.

On EC2, why can't my high-level consumers connect to the brokers?

When a broker starts up, it registers its host ip in ZK. The high-level consumer later uses the registered host ip to establish the socket connection to the broker. By default, the registered ip is given by InetAddress.getLocalHost.getHostAddress. Typically, this should return the real ip of the host. However, in EC2, the returned ip is an internal one and can't be connected to from outside. The solution is to explicitly set the host ip to be registered in ZK by setting the "hostname" property in server.properties.

Should I choose multiple group ids or a single one for the consumers?

If all consumers use the same group id, messages in a topic are distributed among those consumers. In other words, each consumer will get a non-overlapping subset of the messages. Having more consumers in the same group increases the degree of parallelism and the overall throughput of consumption. See the next question for the choice of the number of consumer instances. On the other hand, if each consumer is in its own group, each consumer will get a full copy of all messages.

Why some of the consumers in a consumer group never receive any message?

Currently, a topic partition is the smallest unit that we distribute messages among consumers in the same consumer group. So, if the number of consumers is larger than the total number of partitions in a Kafka cluster (across all brokers), some consumers will never get any data. The solution is to increase the number of partitions on the broker.

Why are there many rebalances in my consumer log?

A typical reason for many rebalances is the consumer side GC. If so, you will see Zookeeper session expirations in the consumer log (grep for Expired). Occasional rebalances are fine. Too many rebalances can slow down the consumption and one will need to tune the java GC setting.

My consumer seems to have stopped, why?

First, try to figure out if the consumer has really stopped or is just slow, using our tool

bin/kafka-run-class.sh kafka.tools.ConsumerOffsetChecker \--group consumer-group1 \--zkconnect zkhost:zkport \--topic topic1 
consumer-group1,topic1,0-0 (Group,Topic,BrokerId-PartitionId)
Owner = consumer-group1-consumer1
Consumer offset = 70121994703
= 70,121,994,703 (65.31G)
Log size = 70122018287
= 70,122,018,287 (65.31G)
Consumer lag = 23584
= 23,584 (0.00G)

If consumer offset is not moving after some time, then consumer is likely to have stopped. If consumer offset is moving, but consumer lag (difference between the end of the log and the consumer offset) is increasing, the consumer is slower than the producer. If the consumer is slow, the typical solution is to increase the degree of parallelism in the consumer. This may require increasing the number of partitions of a topic.

The high-level consumer will block if

• there are no more messages available
  • The ConsumerOffsetChecker will show that the log offset of the partitions being consumed does not change on the broker
• the next message available is larger than the maximum fetch size you have specified
  • One possibility of a stalled consumer is that the fetch size in the consumer is smaller than the largest message in the broker. You can use the DumpLogSegments tool to figure out the largest message size and set fetch.size in the consumer config accordingly.
• your client code simply stops pulling messages from the iterator (the blocking queue will fill up).
  • One of the typical causes is that the application code that consumes messages somehow died and therefore killed the consumer thread. We recommend using a try/catch clause to log all Throwable in the consumer logic.

Brokers

How many topics can I have?

Unlike many messaging systems Kafka topics are meant to scale up arbitrarily. Hence we encourage fewer small topics rather than many small topics. So for example if we were storing notifications for users we would encourage a design with a single notifications topic partitioned by user id rather than a separate topic per user.

The actual scalability is for the most part determined by the number of total partitions across all topics not the number of topics itself (see the question below for details).

How do I choose the number of partitions for a topic?

There isn't really a right answer, we expose this as an option because it is a tradeoff. The simple answer is that the partition count determines the maximum consumer parallelism and so you should set a partition count based on the maximum consumer parallelism you would expect to need (i.e. over-provision). Clusters with up to 10k total partitions are quite workable. Beyond that we don't aggressively test (it should work, but we can't guarantee it).

Here is a more complete list of tradeoffs to consider:

• A partition is basically a directory of log files.
• Each partition must fit entirely on one machine. So if you have only one partition in your topic you cannot scale your write rate or retention beyond the capability of a single machine. If you have 1000 partitions you could potentially use 1000 machines.
• Each partition is totally ordered. If you want a total order over all writes you probably want to have just one partition.
• Each partition is not consumed by more than one consumer thread/process in each consumer group. This allows to have each process consume in a single threaded fashion to guarantee ordering to the consumer within the partition (if we split up a partition of ordered messages and handed them out to multiple consumers even though the messages were stored in order they would be processed out of order at times).
• Many partitions can be consumed by a single process, though. So you can have 1000 partitions all consumed by a single process.
• Another way to say the above is that the partition count is a bound on the maximum consumer parallelism.
• More partitions will mean more files and hence can lead to smaller writes if you don't have enough memory to properly buffer the writes and coalesce them into larger writes
• Each partition corresponds to several znodes in zookeeper. Zookeeper keeps everything in memory so this can eventually get out of hand.
• More partitions means longer leader fail-over time. Each partition can be handled quickly (milliseconds) but with thousands of partitions this can add up.
• When we checkpoint the consumer position we store one offset per partition so the more partitions the more expensive the position checkpoint is.
• It is possible to later expand the number of partitions BUT when we do so we do not attempt to reorganize the data in the topic. So if you are depending on key-based semantic partitioning in your processing you will have to manually copy data from the old low partition topic to a new higher partition topic if you later need to expand.

Note that I/O and file counts are really about #partitions/#brokers, so adding brokers will fix problems there; but zookeeper handles all partitions for the whole cluster so adding machines doesn't help.