Just tried my first topic delete today and it looks like something went wrong on the controller. I issued the command on a test topic and shortly after that a describe looked like:
Topic:TimeoutQueueTest PartitionCount:256 ReplicationFactor:3 Configs: Topic: TimeoutQueueTest Partition: 0 Leader: -1 Replicas: 9,14,15 Isr: Topic: TimeoutQueueTest Partition: 1 Leader: -1 Replicas: 10,15,1 Isr: Topic: TimeoutQueueTest Partition: 2 Leader: -1 Replicas: 11,1,2 Isr: Topic: TimeoutQueueTest Partition: 3 Leader: -1 Replicas: 12,2,3 Isr: Topic: TimeoutQueueTest Partition: 4 Leader: -1 Replicas: 13,3,4 Isr: Topic: TimeoutQueueTest Partition: 5 Leader: -1 Replicas: 14,4,5 Isr: It stayed that way for quite a while so I hit zookeeper and went looking for who was the controller, I found these in that brokers logs: [2014-04-24 16:27:42,498] ERROR Conditional update of path /brokers/topics/TimeoutQueueTest/partitions/170/state with data {"controller_epoch":18,"leader":2,"version":1,"leader_epoch":14,"isr":[2,14]} and expected version 30 failed due to org.apache.zookeeper.KeeperException$BadVersionException: KeeperErrorCode = BadVersion for /brokers/topics/TimeoutQueueTest/partitions/170/state (kafka.utils.ZkUtils$) [2014-04-24 16:27:42,504] ERROR Conditional update of path /brokers/topics/TimeoutQueueTest/partitions/113/state with data {"controller_epoch":18,"leader":2,"version":1,"leader_epoch":4,"isr":[2,15,14]} and expected version 17 failed due to org.apache.zookeeper.KeeperException$BadVersionException: KeeperErrorCode = BadVersion for /brokers/topics/TimeoutQueueTest/partitions/113/state (kafka.utils.ZkUtils$) Any ideas?