Kafka: consumer lag on one partition is skew, not a scaling problem

Adding consumers cannot help when a single partition is behind - one partition is consumed by exactly one member of a group. The cause is almost always a hot key, and more instances just leave more of them idle.

Full code & output

This topic is available to PRO members.

Sign in Create a free account

Run this yourself in the Online Java Compiler, spin up a live REST API in the API Sandbox, or practise with Java interview questions.

Published 2026-08-25