Hi, I am been facing some JAVA high level consumer related issues lately and would like to understand more on this.
We have 9 bare-metals (48 core, 250 GB, Terabytes of Hard disks) running *Kafka 0.8.2* and 5 independent VM (8 core, 60 GB) running zookeeper. I have a topic that has key as metadata and value as a file. The file can be as large as *180 MB.* We have a topic with 90 partitions. Sometimes there will be only one consumer consuming from the topic. When the consumer group for my topic has a *lag in the range of 200's* and when I start a consumer (no other consumer running before) there is *no data* coming through to the consumer. Please find below my consumer parameters. "zookeeper.connect" => <zookeepers>, "group.id" => "default", "consumer.timeout.ms" => "-1", "auto.offset.reset" => "smallest", "auto.commit.enable" => "false", "consumer.timeout.ms" => "-1", "zookeeper.session.timeout.ms" => "100000", "zookeeper.connection.timeout.ms" => "6000", "zookeeper.sync.time.ms" => "2000", "rebalance.backoff.ms" => "20000", "rebalance.max.retries" => "50" "fetch.message.max.bytes" => "188743680", "fetch.size" => "18874368" This problem occurs only when the *auto.offset.reset *property is *smallest. *I am able to get data if the offset is largest. I tried using the *console consumer* for the same topic and consumer group with *--from-beginning* option, I can see the data getting printed. I looked into the ConsoleConsumer code and I saw that there was no *fetch.message.max.bytes *property in the consumer option. So I removed the *fetch.message.max.bytes *from my code and the consumer started working but was throwing exception when the message is large. So *fetch.message.max.bytes *seemed to be the problem but I cannot do without it as my messages a big files. Can someone explain to me what is the issue here? I also adjusted the *fetch.size *parameter according to my max message size but it did not help. To summerize, I would like to understand what is happening in the consumer end when handling large lags with big *fetch.message.max.bytes. * Thanks, Dinesh