I have a simple streaming application that comfortably processes a million records a second against a modest Apache Kafka® cluster running on the far side of the Atlantic ocean. This is clearly too powerful, too efficient, and I risk making myself redundant. Where’s the job security in a high-performing system?

In this code walkthrough we’ll look at the most important performance-tuning settings for Kafka and see how we can easily destroy throughput, add latency, and bring the system grinding to a halt by setting the right parameters to the wrong values.

By the end of the session you’ll know exactly which configuration settings you should look at if you want easy ways to ruin the performance of your own streaming applications. Alternatively, you could use these tips to speed things up, if you’re into that…