Time assertion - parallel steps?

Hello,

Is there some way to run test case steps in parallel?

What I want to do is something like this:

1 - Send an HTTP request, which will trigger a message to be written into a kafka topic.

2 - Read the message from the kafka topic

3 - Measure how much time passed from the moment the HTTP request was sent until the time the message was read by the readyAPI kafka consumer.

It doesn't look like this is really possible, since, if there is a step for the HTTP request and then a next step with a kafka consumer, the time needed to start up the kafka consumer and to connect to the broker will be added, potentially making the entire test case take much longer. This wouldn't happen if the kafka consumer was already running.

Also, if this is done as a performance test (where the time taken for each run of the test case is shown) the total time would be inflated for the same reason.

Any ideas? Or is there something I'm missing that makes such a test possible?