Kafka: exceeding max.poll.interval.ms triggers a rebalance mid-batch

The broker treats a consumer that has not called poll() within the interval as dead and reassigns its partitions. Slow processing therefore causes a rebalance, the rebalance causes redelivery, and the redelivery makes processing slower.

• Kafka: linger.ms=0 does not mean every record is sent alone
• Kafka: an eager rebalance stops the entire consumer group
• Kafka: log compaction never removes the last record for a key, including a tombstone
• Kafka: consumer lag on one partition is skew, not a scaling problem
• Kafka: a read_committed consumer stalls behind one open transaction
• Kafka: a non-idempotent producer reorders on retry

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Published 2026-08-25

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