Consider handling issues related to hanging within Apache's Kafka consumer

[laszloesl]

The following is not an issue with Scala Kafka client, but it would be nice to have a solution/workaround for it.

We have noticed that kafka consumer just hangs when the port or address of a bootstrap server is wrong (i.e., non-existent bs server). This happens in the kafka-console-consumer too, so it is likely an issue within the Java implementation.

A few bug reports/tickets that might be related:

• https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-3457
• https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-1894
• https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-3834

The issue can easily be reproduced with the command:

kafka-console-consumer.sh --bootstrap-server google.com:9092 --from-beginning --topic anything

The process just hangs without producing any output.

The same happens in code, without emitting any error message about the non-existing broker.

[simonsouter]

There is potentially a KIP to look at this issue: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-148%3A+Add+a+connect+timeout+for+client