In general, you should use the consumer connector - unless you have a good reason to load balance and manage offsets manually (which is taken care of in the consumer connector).
- Does the ConsumerConnector manage connections to multiple brokers, > or just a single broker? > Multiple brokers. > - Does the ConsumerConnector require a thread for each partition on > each broker? (If not, how many threads does it require?) > You can specify how many streams you want - if there are more partitions than threads, then a given thread can consume from multiple partitions. If there are more threads than available partitions, there will be idle threads. > - Does the ConsumerConnector use actual asynchronous IO, or does it > mimic it by using a dedicated behind-the-scenes thread (and the > traditional java socket API)? > The consumer connector uses SimpleConsumers for each broker that it connects to. These consumers fetch from each broker and insert chunks into blocking queues which the consumer iterators then dequeue. Joel
