Transactional producer silently fails to commit a transaction.

[vncorpacc]

Description

Versions: in the checklist.
We are using confluent kafka python bindings.
This is largely a copy-paste from redpanda-data/redpanda#17921. It is not clear to me whether the issue lies with a misbehaving broker or a client library. Would appreciate any insights.

Transactional producer silently fails to commit a batch: commit_transaction returns without exceptions but messages are not committed after an inspection of a topic.

The issue was encountered at least 3 times.
First 2 times our producer detected an error at an unexpected scenario: after a certain call to produce() (rd_kafka_produce) that is called some time after a begin_transaction(). produce() returned -172 (wrong state).
After the inspection of the state of the topic it was obvious that a call to commit_transaction() that preceded the last begin_transaction() succeeded as we crash on any errors there. But in redpanda messages were not really committed - they did not show up on the redpanda console and when we tried to read those supposedly committed messages programmatically - the request timed out. The producer also got offsets for those uncommitted messages in an on_delivery callback from redpanda meaning that they reached redpanda but were not committed.
For the 3rd time the producer did throw on commit_transaction but I still include this here as it seems relevant.

confluent_kafka did not output any logs while this was happening.
For 2 times when the producer noticed an error only on a produce call confluent_kafka did not log anything so we only have an error code: cimpl.KafkaException: KafkaError{code=_STATE,val=-172,str="Unable to produce message: Local: Erroneous state"}.

For the 3 time when the producer did fail at commit:
Error: _PURGE_QUEUE. Retriable: False. Fatal: False"}

How to reproduce

We couldn't reproduce the issue in any different scenario: it does not fail in our testing environment with the same exact code for the producer. It does however manifests itself reliably in the production environment.

Checklist

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Please provide the following information:

• librdkafka: v2.2.0, python-confluent-kafka: v2.2.0
• Broker: Redpanda v23.1.17
• Producer Configuration:

{
               'transactional.id': 'REDACTED',
               'enable.idempotence': True,
               'acks': 'all',
               'max.in.flight.requests.per.connection': 5,
               'retries': 5,
               'retry.backoff.ms': 500,
               'linger.ms': 500,
               'security.protocol': 'SSL',
               'ssl.ca.location': 'REDACTED',
               'ssl.certificate.location': 'REDACTED',
               'ssl.key.location': 'REDACTED'
}

• CentOS Linux 7 (Core) x64
• Provided error codes, no logs were printed by the package.
• Broker log excerpts: redpanda-data/redpanda#17921
• Critical issue