The main lever you're going to work with when tuning Kafka throughput will be the number of partitions. A handy method for deciding how many partitions to use is to first calculate the throughput for a single producer (p) and a single consumer (c), and then use that with the desired throughput (t) to roughly estimate the number of partitions to use. You would want at least max(t/p, t/c) partitions to attain the desired throughput. For more information, see Confluent - How to choose the number of topics/partitions in a Kafka cluster?.