[VOTE] 3.7.1 RC1

Hello Kafka users, developers and client-developers, This is the first candidate for release of Apache Kafka 3.7.1. This is a bugfix release with several fixes. Release notes for the 3.7.1 release: https://home.apache.org/~soarez/kafka-3.7.1-rc1/RELEASE_NOTES.html *** Please download, test and

Increase in produce times after kafka 3.7 upgrade

Hello, recently we upgraded kafka from 2.8.0 to 3.7.0 and noticed a 5x value increase from the kafka.request.produce.time.avg datadog metric. There was also a considerable increase in the kafka.request.metadata.time.avg value. It is worth noting the 99percentile metrics are comparable to before the