ClickHouse Ingestion at Scale: An Open-Source Zepto Engineering Story

Back to Devoured - June 22, 2026

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ClickHouse Ingestion at Scale: An Open-Source Zepto Engineering Story

Zepto engineers improved ClickHouse ingestion performance by 45% by rewriting parts of the open-source Kafka Connect connector.

What: By addressing GC pauses and optimizing batching logic in the connector, the team reduced operational overhead while contributing fixes back to the upstream repository.

Why it matters: The maturity of open-source data connectors often lags behind the performance capabilities of the underlying databases like ClickHouse, necessitating deep-dive engineering fixes.

Decoder

GC (Garbage Collection): A form of automatic memory management that can cause latency spikes in JVM-based applications.

Original article

Zepto improved high-scale ClickHouse ingestion by optimizing the open-source Kafka Connect connector. The team rewrote key internals, lifted throughput by 45%, removed severe GC pauses, added smarter batching, and contributed two major fixes upstream.

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