[kitd]

Kafka with a different partitioner would have worked fine. The problem was that the web workers loaded up the same partition. Randomising the chosen partition would have removed, or at least alleviated, the stated problem.

[jiaaro]

Random and round robin partitioning are the configurations being discussed.

The main point of the article is that low message volumes mean you can get unlucky and end up with idle workers when there is still work to be done