Is it recommended to disable auto-commit and manually commit offsets?

• A. Sometimes
• B. Yes
• C. No
• D. Never

Answer: (B)

Managing when offsets are committed in a Kafka consumer is what this item tests. Disabling auto-commit and committing offsets manually gives you control to mark progress only after you’ve successfully processed the messages, so a failure or crash won’t cause you to lose recently processed work or reprocess data you’ve already finished. Typically you process a batch or a stream of records, then commit the current offsets (using commitSync for a guaranteed write or commitAsync for higher throughput with proper error handling). This approach reduces the risk of data loss and duplicates, which is especially important in production systems. While auto-commit might be acceptable in very simple or testing scenarios, the recommended pattern is to disable it and commit manually.