Increase the number of messages read by a Kafka consumer in a single poll

Question

Kafka consumer has a configuration max.poll.records which controls the maximum number of records returned in a single call to poll() and its default value is 500. I have set it to a very high number so that I can get all the messages in a single poll. However, the poll returns only a few thousand messages(roughly 6000) in a single call even though the topic has many more.

How can I further increase the number of messages read by a single consumer?

Answer 1

You can increase Consumer poll() batch size by increasing max.partition.fetch.bytes, but still as per documentation it has limitation with fetch.max.bytes which also need to be increased with required batch size. And also from the documentation there is one other property message.max.bytes in Topic config and Broker config to restrict the batch size. so one way is to increase all of these property based on your required batch size

In Consumer config max.partition.fetch.bytes default value is 1048576

The maximum amount of data per-partition the server will return. Records are fetched in batches by the consumer. If the first record batch in the first non-empty partition of the fetch is larger than this limit, the batch will still be returned to ensure that the consumer can make progress. The maximum record batch size accepted by the broker is defined via message.max.bytes (broker config) or max.message.bytes (topic config). See fetch.max.bytes for limiting the consumer request size

In Consumer Config fetch.max.bytes default value is 52428800

The maximum amount of data the server should return for a fetch request. Records are fetched in batches by the consumer, and if the first record batch in the first non-empty partition of the fetch is larger than this value, the record batch will still be returned to ensure that the consumer can make progress. As such, this is not a absolute maximum. The maximum record batch size accepted by the broker is defined via message.max.bytes (broker config) or max.message.bytes (topic config). Note that the consumer performs multiple fetches in parallel.

In Broker config message.max.bytes default value is 1000012

The largest record batch size allowed by Kafka. If this is increased and there are consumers older than 0.10.2, the consumers' fetch size must also be increased so that the they can fetch record batches this large.

In the latest message format version, records are always grouped into batches for efficiency. In previous message format versions, uncompressed records are not grouped into batches and this limit only applies to a single record in that case.

This can be set per topic with the topic level max.message.bytes config.

In Topic config max.message.bytes default value is 1000012

The largest record batch size allowed by Kafka. If this is increased and there are consumers older than 0.10.2, the consumers' fetch size must also be increased so that the they can fetch record batches this large.

In the latest message format version, records are always grouped into batches for efficiency. In previous message format versions, uncompressed records are not grouped into batches and this limit only applies to a single record in that case.