Hey Krzysztof, So far I haven't had any luck figuring out the cause of the 5 second pause, but I've reproduced it with the old consumer on 0.8.2, so that rules out anything specific to the new consumer. Can you tell me which os/jvm you're seeing it with? Also, can you try changing the "receive.buffer.bytes" consumer configuration to "65536"? This was the default for the old consumer and I haven't been able to reproduce the problem when it is set.
-Jason
