How Most Recent 500 works?
When you first land on a topic consume page, the default search is configured with Most Recent 500 messages.
The intention is to show you the most relevant messages, split across the partitions. This algorithm guarantees to return some messages irrespective of when the records were produced, which we believe is a good starting point when browsing a topic for the first time.
In most cases, it will give you 500 / num_partitions messages, per partition.
If your topic has:
10 partitions, Most Recent 500 will give you 50 messages per partition.
**2 **partitions, Most Recent 500 will give you 250 messages per partition.
Edge cases might occur and the algorithm will account for it seamlessly.
See image below 👇
Most Recent N messages doesn't work well with filters. This is because the filters will only be applied to those 500 messages instead of a large number of records. Prefer switching to a time-based ShowFrom when using filters