Kafka 4.3’s linger.ms tweak swaps latency for higher throughput
Kafka 4.3’s default linger.ms rose from 0 to 5 ms, shrinking latency under light load but boosting throughput when traffic spikes. The change lets producers accumulate larger batches, cutting CPU overhead at the cost of a few milliseconds extra latency per record. Teams should tune linger.ms to match per‑partition rates for optimal performance.