What is request.timeout in the consumer used for?

[Jeff Widman <je...@netskope.com>]

In the consumer, what will trigger the request.timeout?

Is it just if broker doesn't respond within that period of time?

I'm guessing in a healthy cluster, the primary culprit for triggering this
is if one of the steps within the consumer group rebalancing taking a long
time of inter-broker communication before the broker responds to the
consumer... is that true?

Any other common culprits?

Context:
We're seeing this triggered within a dev environment when set at 40
seconds. Our consumers are 3rd-party clients which don't support background
heartbeating. The cluster and consumers otherwise appear healthy, so I'm
guessing it's just slow VMs. But wanted to confirm no unexpected side
effects before I raise this value.