"Commit failed for offsets", and asynchronous offset

Question

I have a kafka consumer from whom I consume data from a specific topic, and I see an exception below. I am using version 0.10.0.0 kafka.

 LoggingCommitCallback.onComplete: Commit failed for offsets= {....}, eventType= some_type, time taken= 19ms, error= org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.CommitFailedException: Commit cannot be completed since the group has already rebalanced and assigned the partitions to another member. This means that the time between subsequent calls to poll() was longer than the configured session.timeout.ms, which typically implies that the poll loop is spending too much time message processing. You can address this either by increasing the session timeout or by reducing the maximum size of batches returned in poll() with max.poll.records. 

I added these two additional consumer features, but it still didn't help:

 session.timeout.ms=20000 max.poll.records=500 

I am doing offsets in another background thread, as shown below:

 kafkaConsumer.commitAsync(new LoggingCommitCallback(consumerType.name())); 

What does this error mean and how to resolve it? Do I need to add some other consumer properties?

Answer 1

Yes, lower max.poll.records. You will get smaller batches of data, but more frequent polling calls, which will result in a result, will help save the session.