RIPT - Reclaimer of Inactive Partitions and Topics

Apache Kafka clusters accumulate dead weight over time.

Unused topics become invisible overhead that drags performance.

RIPT finds them.

RIPT is a stateless Go tool that monitors Kafka topics and flags the ones no one is using — with minimal impact on your cluster.

In 2022 LinkedIn engineers shared a blog post, reducing the number of topics by 20%, request latencies dropped by up to 40% and CPU usage had seen 30% drop, this is simply because every partition still has its metadata stored and served.

RIPT needs only one signal — how long since a topic or partition was last updated. No metrics pipelines, no JMX, no broker-side setup.

Features:

• Stateless - no external dependencies
• Portable - it works regardless of observability setup
• Low footprint - extremely careful about the requests it makes, safe to run on already-busy clusters
• Scalable - Automatic, zero-conf sharding, just run more instances of the RIPT
• It can be run as a long-running daemon or as CLI, can also run as a cron job
• You don't need to run it all the time, a daily run would also be useful
• It can report empty topics
• It can report stalled partitions, this happens when a Kafka producer is not partitioning messages as expected to all partitions.

Get started:

Docker / Podman

Container images can be downloaded from ghcr.io

cat << EOF > .env
RIPT_KAFKA_BROKERS=kafka:9092
RIPT_STATE_TOPIC=ript-state-topic
RIPT_SCAN_INTERVAL_MINUTES=5
EOF

or copy the .env.example

cp .env.example .env

docker run -P --env-file ./.env ghcr.io/omersiar/ript:latest

docker-compose example

git clone https://github.com/omersiar/ript.git
cd ript
cp docker-compose.yml.example docker-compose.yml
docker compose up

Binary from GitHub releases

To run it either create an .env file:

cat << EOF > .env
RIPT_KAFKA_BROKERS=kafka:9092
RIPT_STATE_TOPIC=ript-state-topic
RIPT_SCAN_INTERVAL_MINUTES=5
EOF

or copy the .env.example

cp .env.example .env

if you would like to export them:

export RIPT_KAFKA_BROKERS=kafka:9092
export RIPT_STATE_TOPIC=ript-state-topic
export RIPT_SCAN_INTERVAL_MINUTES=5

./ript

Build it yourself

git clone https://github.com/omersiar/ript.git
cd ript
make build

export RIPT_KAFKA_BROKERS=kafka:9092
export RIPT_STATE_TOPIC=ript-state-topic
export RIPT_SCAN_INTERVAL_MINUTES=5
./bin/ript

For more see quickstart.

MIT Licensed