uneven message distribution

We are upgrading to kafka 0.8.1.1 from 0.8-beta

My first task was to start a stream of messages into a topic, using a 4
node cluster. The topic has 10 partitions and 3 replicas.

I ran the following to produce messages to the topic:

socat - TCP-LISTEN:10000 | ./kafka-console-producer.sh --batch-size 10000
--broker-list kafka10:9092,kafka11:9092,kafka12:9092,kafka13:9092
--compress --request-required-acks 1 --topic luke1 &

And then ran a loop to produce messages via telnet:

while true; do echo "blah blah blah"; done | telnet 127.0.0.1 10000

I verified via the console consumer that messages were being received.
What was strange is that after some time I quit the program and checked
the partition offsets:

./ka fka-run-class.sh kafka.tools.GetOffsetShell --broker-list
kafka10:9092,kafka11:9092,kafka12:9092,kafka13:9092 --topic luke1 --time
-1

luke1:0:1853139
luke1:1:9
luke1:2:1
luke1:3:3
luke1:4:50
luke1:5:266603
luke1:6:80035
luke1:7:3455509
luke1:8:3756164
luke1:9:5

They are very uneven, any ideas what is going on here?

Thanks,
Luke Forehand | Networked Insights | Software Engineer