Consumer Lag Is Not a Throughput Problem Until You Prove It Is
Lag climbing on one partition while the rest keep up tells you something specific. Here is how to read the numbers before you add consumers that cannot help.
| Shape | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Even across all partitions, growing | Genuine throughput shortfall |
| One partition, growing | Key skew, or a poison message |
| All partitions, sawtooth | Batch processing, probably fine |
| Growing then flat at a ceiling | Consumer stopped, offsets frozen |
| Sudden jump, then normal rate | Producer burst, will drain |
Published on debugly.dev by Rohit Bhadani | Founder of Krova Cloud
