Cloudera Docs

Handling large messages

Learn more about the options you have when handling large messages with Kafka.

Kafka can be tuned to handle large messages. This can be done by configuring broker and consumer properties relating to maximum message and file sizes. However, before doing so, Cloudera recommends that you try and reduce the size of messages first. Review the following options that can help you reduce message size.

  • The Kafka producer can compress messages. For example, if the original message is a text-based format (such as XML), in most cases the compressed message will be sufficiently small.
  • Use the compression.type producer configuration parameters to enable compression. gzip, lz4, Snappy, and Zstandard are supported.
  • If shared storage (such as NAS, HDFS, or S3) is available, consider placing large files on the shared storage and using Kafka to send a message with the file location. In many cases, this can be much faster than using Kafka to send the large file itself.
  • Split large messages into 1 KB segments with the producing client, using partition keys to ensure that all segments are sent to the same Kafka partition in the correct order. The consuming client can then reconstruct the original large message.

If none the options presented are viable, and you need to send large messages with Kafka, you can do so by configuring the following parameters based on your requirements.

Table 1. Broker Configuration Properties
Property Default Value Description
message.max.bytes 1000000

(1 MB)

 Maximum message size the broker accepts.
log.segment.bytes 1073741824

(1 GiB)

 Size of a Kafka data file. Must be larger than any single message.
replica.fetch.max.bytes 1048576

(1 MiB)

 Maximum message size a broker can replicate. Must be larger than message.max.bytes, or a broker can accept messages it cannot replicate, potentially resulting in data loss.
Table 2. Consumer Configuration Properties
Property Default Value Description
max.partition.fetch.bytes 1048576

(10 MiB)

 The maximum amount of data per-partition the server will return.
fetch.max.bytes 52428800

(50 MiB)

 The maximum amount of data the server should return for a fetch request.