According to the official Apache Kafka producer metrics documentation, the I/O thread ratio and I/O thread wait ratio indicate how busy the producer’s network I/O thread is and how much time it spends waiting. When both metrics are low, it means the I/O thread is underutilized and not blocked on network operations.

This strongly suggests that the bottleneck is not network-related. If there were network latency or a bad data link (Option B), the I/O thread wait ratio would be high. Similarly, large batches (Option A) or compression (Option D) generally increase throughput and would result in higher I/O utilization.

An expensive or blocking callback function (for example, heavy logic in onCompletion()) executes in the producer’s sender thread context. Kafka documentation explicitly warns that slow callbacks can throttle producer throughput because they delay the processing of acknowledgements and subsequent sends.

Therefore, the most likely and documented cause of low producer throughput with low I/O utilization is expensive callback logic in the producer code.

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