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pythonapache-kafkakafka-consumer-apikafka-python

How to stop Python Kafka Consumer in program?


I am doing Python Kafka consumer (trying to use kafka.consumer.SimpleConsumer or kafka.consumer.simple.SimpleConsumer in http://kafka-python.readthedocs.org/en/latest/apidoc/kafka.consumer.html). When I run the following piece of code, it will run all the time, even if all messages consumed. I hope the consumer will stop if it consume all the messages. How to do it? Also I have no idea how to use stop() function (which is in base class kafka.consumer.base.Consumer).

UPDATE

I used signal handler to call consumer.stop(). Some error messages were printed out to the screen. But the program still was stuck in the for-loop. When new messages came in, the consumer consumed them and printed them. I also tried client.close(). But the same result.

I need some ways to stop the for-loop gracefully.

        client = KafkaClient("localhost:9092")
        consumer = SimpleConsumer(client, "test-group", "test")

        consumer.seek(0, 2)# (0,2) and (0,0)

        for message in consumer:
            print "Offset:", message.offset
            print "Value:", message.message.value

Any help is welcome. Thanks.


Solution

  • Use the iter_timeout parameter to set the waiting time. If set to 10, just like the following piece of code, it will exit if no new message come in in 10 seconds. The default value is None, which means that the consumer will block here even if no new messages come in.

            self.consumer = SimpleConsumer(self.client, "test-group", "test",
                    iter_timeout=10)
    

    Update

    The above is not a good method. When lots of messages come in, it is hard to set a small enough iter_timeout to guarantee the stopping. So, now, I am using get_message() function, which try to consume one message and stop. None is returned when no new messages.