doc-exports/docs/dms/umn/kafka_faq_0061.html

Why Is It Not Recommended to Use a Sarama Client for Messaging?

Symptom

If a Sarama client is used to send and receive messages, the following issues may occur:

• Sarama cannot detect partition changes. Adding topic partitions requires client restart to enable consumption.
• Sarama's default MaxProcessingTime is 100 ms. When this limit is reached, consumers can no longer consume messages.
• If consumer offsets reset from the oldest (earliest) position, all messages starting from the earliest position may be repeatedly consumed after the client restarts.
• A consumer that subscribes to multiple topics may not be able to consume any message from specific partitions.

Solution

Use confluent-kafka-go as the Kafka client library.

For details, see Table 1.

Table 1 Comparing common Go clients

Client	Pros	Cons
confluent-kafka-go	An official Kafka client by Confluent that supports full Kafka compatibility and all Kafka features High stability and performance, and low latency based on librdkafka	High compiling complexity because Go compilers need extra resources to configure the imported C++ libraries
kafka-go	A simple and lite Kafka client easy for learning and usage Reduced application size and complexity with limited library and fewer dependencies	Fewer advanced functions and configurations than confluent-kafka-go Applicable only to simple scenarios that require low performance and throughput
Sarama	Better asynchronization and higher concurrency (written in the original Go language)	Many bugs, limited documentation Deteriorates application performance when processing a large number of messages due to large memory consumption

Parent topic: Connections