Kafka: A dead letter topic stops one bad record blocking a partition

Without it, a record that always fails is retried for ever and nothing behind it is ever processed.

Code

@Bean
DefaultErrorHandler errorHandler(KafkaTemplate<Object, Object> template) {
    var recoverer = new DeadLetterPublishingRecoverer(template);
    return new DefaultErrorHandler(recoverer, new FixedBackOff(1000L, 3));
}

Output

3 retries 1s apart, then the record is published to orders.DLT
and the consumer moves on to the next offset.

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Published 2026-08-11