I was testing my own code, and using the console consumer against my seemingly-working-producer code. Since the last update, the console consumer crashes. I am going to try to track it down in the debugger and will come back with a patch if found.
Command line: KAFKA_OPTS="-Xmx512M -server -Dlog4j.configuration=file:$PWD/config/log4j.properties -Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=4244" \ bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh config/consumer.properties --zookeeper localhost:2181 --topic types Stacktrace: [2012-12-07 16:11:34,421] ERROR Error processing message, stopping consumer: (kafka.consumer.ConsoleConsumer$) java.lang.IllegalArgumentException at java.nio.Buffer.limit(Buffer.java:247) at kafka.message.Message.sliceDelimited(Message.scala:225) at kafka.message.Message.payload(Message.scala:207) at kafka.consumer.ConsumerIterator.makeNext(ConsumerIterator.scala:110) at kafka.consumer.ConsumerIterator.makeNext(ConsumerIterator.scala:33) at kafka.utils.IteratorTemplate.maybeComputeNext(IteratorTemplate.scala:61) at kafka.utils.IteratorTemplate.hasNext(IteratorTemplate.scala:53) at scala.collection.Iterator$class.foreach(Iterator.scala:631) at kafka.utils.IteratorTemplate.foreach(IteratorTemplate.scala:32) at scala.collection.IterableLike$class.foreach(IterableLike.scala:79) at kafka.consumer.KafkaStream.foreach(KafkaStream.scala:25) at kafka.consumer.ConsoleConsumer$.main(ConsoleConsumer.scala:189) at kafka.consumer.ConsoleConsumer.main(ConsoleConsumer.scala) All advice gladly accepted, including "you blew it, you blind fool!" ;) -b