Kafka Intermediate: Advanced Producer Configuration

In Apache Kafka, advanced producer configurations allow for fine-tuning the performance and behavior of Kafka producers. Proper configuration can enhance throughput, reliability, and latency of your Kafka producer.

1. Producer Configuration Parameters

Kafka producers have several configuration parameters that control various aspects of their operation. Here are some key advanced configurations:

1.1. acks

The acks parameter controls the number of acknowledgments the producer requires the leader to have received before considering a request complete. Possible values are:

• 0: The producer does not wait for any acknowledgment from the server. This offers the lowest latency but no guarantee of message durability.
• 1: The producer gets an acknowledgment after the leader replica has received the message. This provides some durability but can be subject to leader failures.
• all: The producer waits for the full set of in-sync replicas to acknowledge the message. This provides the highest level of durability but can increase latency.

# Example configuration
props.put("acks", "all");
    

1.2. retries

The retries parameter specifies the number of retries for failed sends. Configuring this helps handle transient errors more gracefully:

# Example configuration
props.put("retries", "3");
    

1.3. batch.size

The batch.size parameter controls the maximum size of a batch of records sent to a broker. Larger batch sizes can improve throughput but may increase latency:

# Example configuration
props.put("batch.size", "16384");  // 16 KB
    

1.4. linger.ms

The linger.ms parameter controls the amount of time to wait before sending a batch of records. This allows the producer to batch multiple records together:

# Example configuration
props.put("linger.ms", "5");
    

1.5. compression.type

The compression.type parameter specifies the compression codec to use for compressing messages. Supported values are none,