Hi, This is an ancient task, but I feel it is still current today (specially since as somebody that deals with a Kafka cluster I know that this happens more often than not).
The task is about garbage collection of topics in a sort of automated way. After some consideration I started a prototype implementation based on a manual process: 1. Using the cli, I can use the --describe-topic to get a list of topics that have size 0 2. Massage that list into something that can be then fed into the cli and remove the topics that have size 0. The guiding principle here is the assumption that abandoned topics will eventually have size 0, because all records will expire. This is not true for all topics, but it covers a large portion of them and having something like this would help admins to find "suspicious" topics at least. I started implementing this change and I realized that it would require a change in the protocol, because the sizes are never sent over the wire. Funny enough we collect the sizes of the log files, but we do not send them. I think this kind of changes will require a KIP, but I wanted to ask what others think about this. The in-progress implementation of this can be found here: https://github.com/carlosduclos/kafka/commit/0dffe5e131c3bd32b77f56b9be8eded89a96df54 Comments? -- Carlos Manuel Duclos Vergara Backend Software Developer
