If I have same hardware, to use Kafka or our current solution(ServiceMix/Camel). Is there any difference? Can Kafka handle "bigger" data than it? Why?
There is a article to talk about how fast could it be? But I still don't get clearly why Kafka is so fast comparing to other solutions? Benchmarking Apache Kafka: 2 Million Writes Per Second (On Three Cheap Machines)
Kafka is fast for a number of reasons. To name a few.
- Zero Copy - See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-copy basically it calls the OS kernal direct rather than at the application layer to move data fast.
- Batch Data in Chunks - Kafka is all about batching the data into chunks. This minimises cross machine latency with all the buffering/copying that accompanies this.
- Avoids Random Disk Access - as Kafka is an immutable commit log it does not need to rewind the disk and do many random I/O operations and can just access the disk in a sequential manner. This enables it to get similar speeds from a physical disk compared with memory.
- Can Scale Horizontally - The ability to have thousands of partitions for a single topic spread among thousands of machines means Kafka can handle huge loads.
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32631064/why-kafka-so-fast