Kafka retry in batch listener behaving differently in 2 scenarios - spring-kafka

Question

Spring-boot : 2.7.1,
Spring-kafka : 2.8.7
I tested kafka retry with error handling in my local where I publish around 1500 messages and I listen in batches and process them in loop (Only 1 topic which has 1 partition). It is working as expected, that is the message is retried to process again and upon exhaustion of retries it is sent to error topic.
KafkaConfig
#Bean
public ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory<String, Object> kafkaListenerContainerFactory(KafkaTemplate<String, String> kafkaTemplate){
ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory<String, Object> factory = new ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory<>();
factory.setConsumerFactory(consumerFactory());
factory.setBatchListener(true);
DeadLetterPublishingRecoverer deadLetterPublishingRecoverer = new DeadLetterPublishingRecoverer(kafkaTemplate,
(consumer, e) -> new TopicPartition("errortopic", -1));
FixedBackOff fixedBackOff = new FixedBackOff(10,2);
DefaultErrorHandler defaultErrorHandler = new DefaultErrorHandler(deadLetterPublishingRecoverer, fixedBackOff);
factory.setCommonErrorHandler(defaultErrorHandler);
return factory;
}
#Bean
public ConsumerFactory<String, Object> consumerFactory() {
Map<String, Object> props = getDefaultParams();
props.put(ConsumerConfig.KEY_DESERIALIZER_CLASS_CONFIG, StringDeserializer.class);
props.put(ConsumerConfig.VALUE_DESERIALIZER_CLASS_CONFIG, StringDeserializer.class);
props.put(ConsumerConfig.MAX_POLL_RECORDS_CONFIG, 20);
return new DefaultKafkaConsumerFactory<>(props);
}
Listener
#Autowired
private MyService myservice;
#KafkaListener(id="sample-listener", topics= {"topic1", "topic2"})
public void listen(final List<ConsumerRecord<String, String> records) {
for(ConsumerRecord<String, String> record: records)
try {
myservice.process(record.value());
} catch(Exception e) {
throw new BatchListenerFailedException("Failure in processing message", record);
}
}
Service
#Transactional
public void process(String record){
count++;
if(count == 2 || count ==3){
throw new RuntimeException();
}
}
When I run it in dev environment, where we have 2 topics and each topic has 64 partitions (messages will be around 100k an hour), the message is not retried at all.