Delay in message consumption from Kafka Topic

Clients
1

I have a set of Kafka consumer which are subscribed to a Kafka topic with 16 partitions. Consumers run a long processing job which sometimes takes (2 hours).

I have observed that there is a lot of delay in message consumption when the consumers are free after completing the previous job.

I have tried setting the max poll interval seconds to 2 or 3 hours but it has not helped.

Below is my consumer config code

    consumer_config = {
        'bootstrap.servers': APPCONFIG['BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS'],
        'security.protocol': 'SSL',
        'ssl.keystore.location': APPCONFIG['SSL_KEYSTORE_LOCATION'],
        'ssl.keystore.password': APPCONFIG['SSL_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD'],
        'ssl.ca.location': APPCONFIG['SSL_CA_LOCATION'],
        'group.id': APPCONFIG['GROUP_ID'],
        'auto.offset.reset': 'earliest',
        'max.poll.interval.ms': int(APPCONFIG['MAX_POLL_INTERVAL'])            
    }

and below is the processing code

consumer = Consumer(consumer_config)
consumer.subscribe([topic])
consumer.commit()
p = Processor(message)
p.start_processing()