When/how does a topic “marked for deletion” get finally removed?

Question

I have issued the command to delete a topic:

./bin/kafka-topics.sh --zookeeper localhost:2181 --delete --topic  vip_ips_alerts

It seemed to

Answer 1

I faced the same issue and spend a couple of days trying to identify with the issue was. I triggered command to delete the topics, however the topics were marked for deletion but they were not deleted.

1. I first checked the configuration which are set right. Under: server.properties

   delete.topic.enable=true for all brokers

2. I restarted the broker to check if the topics got delete (No!!).
3. I check no data under /kafka/data folder.
4. I even considered the option to wait until the retention time got exceed.

None helped. I had to finally login to zooker

./zkCli.sh # and delete the topics using 
rmr /brokers/topics/<> and rmr /admin/delete_topics/<>

Please remember to restart kafka after this. Hope this solves your issue.