Maximize I/O throughput: Async/await consumers in Python Kafka. Day 10 of the WKafka Open-Source Engineering Series. Calling a slow external API inside a standard synchronous Kafka consumer is a recipe for missed heartbeats. WKafka supports async def natively. The Pain Points We Faced Sync network requests (HTTP, DB queries) freezing the Kafka consumer thread Missed broker heartbeats causing unwanted consumer group rebalance storms Expensive multi-process archite...