Re: KafkaProducer partitionsFor v/s KafkaAdminClient describeTopics

Hi Anana,

Typically in Kafka, it is useful for Consumers to know about the number of partitions (as the number of consumers must be <= partitions).
So one way for Consumers to find partitions is the KafkaConsumer class using the partitionsFor(topic) method, https://kafka.apache.org/40/javadoc/org/apache/kafka/clients/consumer/KafkaConsumer.html#partitionsFor(java.lang.String)

Regards, Paul Brebner


From: Subra I <iamsubra100@gmail.com>
Date: Wednesday, 11 June 2025 at 12:42 am
To: users@kafka.apache.org <users@kafka.apache.org>, dev@kafka.apache.org <dev@kafka.apache.org>
Subject: KafkaProducer partitionsFor v/s KafkaAdminClient describeTopics
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Hi All,

I need to know the number of partitions for a topic before
producing/consuming. Some users may set the number of partitions for a
given topic but some users may just set the number of partitions in
server.properties. It should work for both cases.

Which method is better for a production grade software:

1. KafkaProducer partitionsFor
2. KafkaAdminClient describeTopics: you need to extract the topic you are
interested in and get the partition info from the metadata.

A quick Google search tells me that describeTopics approach is more
comprehensive.

Also, will the use of KafkaProducer partitionsFor work for clustered
environments?

Thanks,
Anand