Leadership rebalance causing drop of incoming messages

Hello,

We did a manual leadership rebalance (using
PreferredReplicaLeaderElectionCommand) under heavy load and found that
there is a significant drop of incoming messages to the broker cluster for
more than an hour. Looking at broker log, we found a lot of errors like
this:

2015-01-15 00:00:03,330 ERROR kafka.utils.Logging$class:103
[kafka-processor-7101-0] [error] Closing socket for /10.213.156.41
because of error
java.io.IOException: Connection reset by peer
at sun.nio.ch.FileDispatcherImpl.read0(Native Method)
at sun.nio.ch.SocketDispatcher.read(SocketDispatcher.java:39)
at sun.nio.ch.IOUtil.readIntoNativeBuffer(IOUtil.java:223)
at sun.nio.ch.IOUtil.read(IOUtil.java:197)
at sun.nio.ch.SocketChannelImpl.read(SocketChannelImpl.java:379)
at kafka.utils.Utils$.read(Utils.scala:375)
at kafka.network.BoundedByteBufferReceive.readFrom(BoundedByteBufferReceive.scala:54)
at kafka.network.Processor.read(SocketServer.scala:347)
at kafka.network.Processor.run(SocketServer.scala:245)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:745)

Is leadership rebalance a safe operation?

Thanks.