Consumer is never shutdown

Hi,

I just started with Apache Kafka and wrote a high level consumer program
following the example given here
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/Consumer+Group+Example.

Though, I was able to run the program and consume the messages, I have one
doubt regarding *consumer.shutdown()*. It has never been called. I used the
below piece of code to verify
if (consumer != null) {
System.out.println("shutting down consumer");
consumer.shutdown();

Has someone encountered this before? Also, even if consumer didn't
shutdown, I didn't notice any bottleneck. Is it really needed?

Regards
Anand