Apache Kafka Complete Practice Exam 2025 – All-in-One Prep

Prioritizing the reduction of the size of the page cache is crucial when managing memory in Kafka because the page cache plays a direct role in how efficiently Kafka operates. Kafka uses the operating system's page cache to cache segments of messages, which allows for faster access to the data being processed. When memory is constrained, if the page cache is too large, it can lead to increased pressure on system memory usage, causing performance degradation.

By reducing the size of the page cache, more memory is freed for Kafka's internal structures, like buffers for incoming and outgoing data, which are critical for maintaining throughput and latency. This balance is essential to ensure that the Kafka brokers can handle messages efficiently without resorting to swapping, which can severely impact performance.

In contrast, while increasing hardware resources, finding external storage solutions, or configuring more replicas can have benefits, they may not directly address the immediate concerns posed by insufficient memory management. Increasing hardware resources might be more of a long-term solution and could also involve a higher cost. External storage solutions may introduce additional latency, and configuring more replicas primarily focuses on data safety and availability rather than optimizing memory usage for performance. Thus, managing the page cache size is the most immediate and impactful action for ensuring efficient memory usage in Kafka