intermediateConsumer Errors, Retry & Recovery
What is a 'poison pill' message in Kafka consumer processing, and why is it dangerous if not handled?
A poison pill is a message that causes processing to fail every single time it's retried (e.g. malformed data that always throws a parse exception) — without special handling, a naive retry-forever consumer gets stuck reprocessing that same message endlessly, blocking every message behind it on that partition from ever being processed.
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