Kafka Error THROTTLING_QUOTA_EXCEEDED
Error code 89 · Retriable Admin
The throttling quota has been exceeded.
Common Causes
- Client (producer, consumer, or admin) exceeded the byte-rate or request-rate quota configured per user/client-id via kafka-configs.sh
- A bulk admin operation (topic creation, config changes, metadata fetches) hit the controller mutation rate limit (controller_mutations_rate quota)
- Sudden traffic spike from a producer or consumer that was not previously quota-limited, e.g. after a deployment or data backfill
Solutions
- Increase the quota for the specific user or client-id: kafka-configs.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --alter --add-config 'producer_byte_rate=<value>' --entity-type clients --entity-name <client-id>
- Add backoff logic in the client on this retriable error — the broker returns a throttle time in the response; respect it before retrying
- Identify the top quota consumers by checking broker metrics kafka.network:type=RequestChannel,name=RequestQueueSize and kafka.server:type=ClientQuotaManager
Diagnostic Commands
# Check client quota configuration
kafka-configs.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --describe --entity-type clients --entity-name <client-id>
# Check user credential configuration
kafka-configs.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 --describe --entity-type users --entity-defaultRelated APIs
This error can be returned by: CreateTopics · DeleteTopics · Fetch · Produce
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