Apache Kafka Practice Exam 2025 – The Complete All-in-One Guide for Exam Success!

Optimizing message consumption in Kafka is crucial for maintaining high throughput and low latency in a distributed environment. Ensuring fast replication of messages plays a vital role in this process. When messages are replicated quickly, consumers are more likely to access the most recent data without delays, allowing them to read messages as soon as they are produced. Fast replication contributes to data availability and durability, ensuring that messages are not lost even in the event of node failures, and it helps maintain consistent consumer performance.

On the other hand, while options like allowing messages to stay indefinitely in page cache or increasing swap usage may seem beneficial at first glance, they do not directly contribute to optimized message consumption. Keeping messages too long in the cache can lead to potential memory bloat and inefficient resource usage. Increasing swap usage might degrade performance further by increasing I/O operations. Limiting the number of in-sync replicas could create a risk of data inconsistency and reduce the overall reliability of the system, which is counterproductive to the goal of reliable message consumption. Thus, focusing on fast replication is a more effective strategy for optimizing how consumers access and process messages in Kafka.