Integration / Apache Pulsar Interview questions
What is message retention in Pulsar?
Retention determines how long already-acknowledged messages are kept in BookKeeper after every subscription has consumed them, since by default Pulsar deletes data once no subscription needs it anymore.
Configuring a retention policy (size- and/or time-based) at the namespace or topic level keeps messages around even after acknowledgment, useful for replaying history or onboarding a new subscription that needs to read from an earlier point.
This differs from a backlog quota, which limits how much unacknowledged data can accumulate for slow or stalled consumers - retention protects already-read data, backlog quota protects against unread data growing unbounded.
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