Poison message
A poison message is a message that repeatedly fails processing and can prevent normal consumption until it is isolated, rejected, or discarded.
Kafka for Architects
A poison pill message is a malformed or otherwise unprocessable message that repeatedly causes a consumer or processing stage to fail.
- How it is used
- Frames malformed or incompatible records as an operational failure mode requiring consumer tests, offset recovery, and dead-letter handling.
- How deep it goes
- Traces failure loops, offset resets, schema incompatibility, and DLT responses, but stops short of implementation walkthroughs.
- Examples
- Uses missing fields, an added source column, incompatible Avro schemas, connector stoppage, and sink-side DLT redirection.
- What you can do after
- Diagnose poison messages, reset consumer offsets, configure DLT handling, and monitor connector failures and redirected records.
C# Concurrency: Asynchronous and multithreaded programming
A poison message is a message that repeatedly fails processing and may prevent normal queue consumption unless it is isolated or discarded.
- How it is used
- Protects persistent background queues from messages that repeatedly prevent normal consumption.
- How deep it goes
- Explains the restart loop and quarantine response, but does not specify retry thresholds or a complete implementation.
- Examples
- Uses a crashing queue item, a try-catch monitor, and a separate persistent queue for failed messages.
- What you can do after
- Diagnose queue stalls by identifying repeated failures and isolating the offending message for inspection.
Read how C# Concurrency: Asynchronous and multithreaded programming explains poison message →
Related concepts
- messagekind of · A message is a discrete unit of information or data represented, processed, or exchanged in a communication context.
- dead-letter topic patternaddressed by · The dead-letter topic pattern redirects messages that cannot be processed to a separate topic for later investigation or handling.
- dead letter queuepart of · A dead-letter queue is a destination that stores messages or records that cannot be delivered or processed normally for later inspection, retry, handling, or disposal.
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