Kafka Streams application stops working after no message have been read for a while

Question

I have noticed that my Kafka Streams application stops working when it has not read new messages from the Kafka topic for a while. It is the third time that I have seen this happen.

No messages have been produced to the topic since 5 days. My Kafka Streams application, which also hosts a spark-java webserver, is still responsive. However, the messages I produce to the Kafka topic are not being read by Kafka Streams anymore. When I restart the application, all messages will be fetched from the broker.

How can I make my Kafka Streams Application more durable to this kind of scenario? It feels that Kafka Streams has an internal "timeout" after which it closes the connection to the Kafka broker when no messages have been received. I could not find such a setting in the documentation.

I use Kafka 1.1.0 and Kafka Streams 1.0.0

Answer 1

Kafka Streams do not have an internal timeout to control when to permanently close a connection to the Kafka broker; Kafka broker, on the other hand, does have some timeout value to close idle connections from clients. But Streams will keep trying to re-connect once it has some processed result data that is ready to be sent to the brokers. So I'd suspect your observed issue came from some other causes.

Could you share your application topology sketch and the config properties you used, for me to better understand your issue?