Kafka Share Groups and Parallelizing Consumption — Tuning max.poll.records

2026-05-28

With Kafka Share Groups, the main bottleneck shifts from partition count to the combination of max.record.locks and max.poll.records. The default of 500 is often too high and causes “greedy capture” (a few consumers hog large batches). The recommended setting is roughly max.record.locks / consumers-per-partition (then tune slightly lower) for stable, high throughput.