Skip to content
Kafka Is FunProgress

Intermediate7 min

ISR Shrink Under Follower Lag

Simulate follower lag exceeding replica.lag.time.max.ms and observe ISR shrinkage.

A follower that falls too far behind the leader (e.g., due to disk I/O, GC pauses, network congestion) is removed from the ISR. This degrades fault tolerance. If ISR drops below min.insync.replicas, acks=all writes are rejected.

The steps below reference the interactive simulator, which is being migrated into /simulate next — until it lands, treat this as the written runbook for the exercise.

Steps

0 of 8 steps completed

Verification

ISR should recover to 3/3 after reducing lag. acks=all writes should succeed again.

The interview angle

ISR shrink is caused by replica.lag.time.max.ms breach. Production fix: check follower disk I/O, GC pauses, network. Alert on URP > 0.