Are Kafka Heartbeat messages running on independent thread or are they linked to consumer poll and commit?
01:25 22 Dec 2025

Is Kafka consumer heartbeat message same as consumer poll and commit? Or does it run on a separate thread and keeps sending heartbeat to Kafka broker as long as the consumer JVM is responding?

The last line the shown paragraph looks confusing to me thoughenter image description here

Doesn't it indicate that Heartbeat is somehow linked to the consumer poll and commits? if so how?

java apache-kafka documentation kafka-consumer-api heartbeat