In consumer batching mode, then this option is specifying a time in millis, to trigger batch completion eager when the current batch size has not reached the maximum size defined by maxPollRecords. Notice the trigger is not exact at the given interval, as this can only happen between kafka polls (see pollTimeoutMs option). So for example setting this to 10000, then the trigger happens in the interval 10000 pollTimeoutMs. The default value for pollTimeoutMs is 5000, so this would mean a trigger interval at about every 15 seconds.