title: Kafka single consumer failure in a group
body: <p>I am in the initial phases of exploring Kafka, version 0.8.1.1.</p>
  
  <p>I've successfully run the Consumer Group Example, with multiple partitions and its distributing messages among the consumers quite well.</p>
  
  <p>One test case I wanted to run is when a consumer in the group dies suddenly (example, kill -9  ). When I do so, I expected rebalancing to occur, but its not happening. So, can I do one of these things?</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Trigger rebalancing using API</li>
  <li>Configure kafka to wait for a certain time for the consumer activity and rebalance automatically assuming it was shut down ungracefully.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>The problem here is, all the messages in the partitions assigned to the dead Consumer remains in the queue and is never processed until rebalancing occurs.</p>