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

We had this issue when deleting topics. The topics had been created when delete.topic.enable=true had not been set. We set that in config, restarted kafka to apply the new config. Deleted the topics and saw the "marked for deletion". We then restarted kafka again. After 40 minutes though all topics had been deleted (9 topics with total partitions in the thousands). The topics with higher numbers of partitions seemed to take longer, which initially made it look like nothing was happening.