Delete message after consuming it in KAFKA

apache-kafka kafka-consumer-api
Shaik Mujahid Ali picture Shaik Mujahid Ali · Feb 18, 2015 · Viewed 36.1k times · Source

I am using apache kafka to produce and consume a file 5GB in size. I want to know if there is a way where the message from the topic is automatically removed after it is consumed. Do I have any way to keep track of consumed messages? I don't want to delete it manually.

Answer

Lundahl picture Lundahl · Feb 18, 2015

In Kafka, the responsibility of what has been consumed is the responsibility of the consumer and this is also one of the main reasons why Kafka has such great horizontal scalability.

Using the high level consumer API will automatically do this for you by committing consumed offsets in Zookeeper (or a more recent configuration option is using by a special Kafka topic to keep track of consumed messages).

The simple consumer API make you deal with how and where to keep track of consumed messages yourself.

Purging of messages in Kafka is done automatically by either specifying a retention time for a topic or by defining a disk quota for it so for your case of one 5GB file, this file will be deleted after the retention period you define has passed, regardless of if it has been consumed or not.

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