Kafka __consumer_offsets growing in size

Question

We are using Kafka as a Strictly Ordered Queue and hence a single topic/single partition/single consumer group combo is in use. I should be able to use multiple

Answer 1

offsets.retention.minutes and log.retention.XXX properties will impact a physical removal of records/messages/logs only if offset file rolling occurs.

In general, offsets.retention.minutes property dictates that a broker should forget about your consumer if a consumer disappeared for the specified amount of time and it can do that even without removing log files from the disk.

If you set this value to a relatively low number and check your __consumer_offsets topic while there are no active consumers, over time you will notice something like:

    [group,topic,7]::OffsetAndMetadata(offset=7, leaderEpoch=Optional.empty, metadata=, commitTimestamp=1557475923142, expireTimestamp=None)
    [group,topic,8]::OffsetAndMetadata(offset=6, leaderEpoch=Optional.empty, metadata=, commitTimestamp=1557475923142, expireTimestamp=None)
    [group,topic,6]::OffsetAndMetadata(offset=7, leaderEpoch=Optional.empty, metadata=, commitTimestamp=1557475923142, expireTimestamp=None)
    [group,topic,19]::NULL
    [group,topic,5]::NULL
    [group,topic,22]::NULL

Which signifies how event store systems, like Kafka, work in general. They record new events, instead of changing the existing ones.

I am not aware of any Kafka version where topics are deleted/cleaned up every 60 minutes by default and I have a feeling you misinterpreted something from the documentation.

It seems that the way __consumer_offsets are managed is very different from regular topics. The only way to get __consumer_offsets deleted is to force rolling of its files. That, however, doesn't happen same way it does for regular log files. While regular log files(for your data topics) are rolled automatically every time they are deleted, regardless of log.roll. property, __consumer_offsets don't do that. And if they are not rolled and stay at the initial ...00000 segment, they are not deleted at all. So, it seems the way to reduce your __consumer_offsets files is:

1. Set relatively small log.roll. ;
2. Manipulate offsets.retention.minutes if you can afford to disconnect your consumers;
3. Otherwise adjust log.retention.XXX property.