Kafka always immediately writes all data to the filesystem and supports the ability to configure the flush policy that controls when data is forced out of the OS cache and onto disk using the flush. This flush policy can be controlled to force data to disk after a period of time or after a certain number of messages has been written. There are several choices in this configuration.
Kafka must eventually call fsync to know that data was flushed. When recovering from a crash for any log segment not known to be fsync’d Kafka will check the integrity of each message by checking its CRC and also rebuild the accompanying offset index file as part of the recovery process executed on startup.
Note that durability in Kafka does not require syncing data to disk, as a failed node will always recover from its replicas.
We recommend using the default flush settings which disable application fsync entirely. This means relying on the background flush done by the OS and Kafka’s own background flush. This provides the best of all worlds for most uses: no knobs to tune, great throughput and latency, and full recovery guarantees. We generally feel that the guarantees provided by replication are stronger than sync to local disk, however the paranoid still may prefer having both and application level fsync policies are still supported.
The drawback of using application level flush settings is that it is less efficient in its disk usage pattern (it gives the OS less leeway to re-order writes) and it can introduce latency as fsync in most Linux filesystems blocks writes to the file whereas the background flushing does much more granular page-level locking.
In general you don’t need to do any low-level tuning of the filesystem, but in the next few sections we will go over some of this in case it is useful.