Consumer rebalance per topic

(From http://kafka.apache.org/design.html) one potential benefit of the existing rebalancing logic is to reduce the number of connections to brokers per consumer instance. However, if you have a large number of partitions and few brokers and/or consumer instances then it wouldn't really help; so I agree it would be good to implement KAFKA-687. KAFKA-564 may also be related - i.e., it may be easier to implement along with/after KAFKA-687, Joel -- Joel Koshy