Rally 0.7.4¶
You want to benchmark Elasticsearch? Then Rally is for you. It can help you with the following tasks:
- Setup and teardown of an Elasticsearch cluster for benchmarking
- Management of benchmark data and specifications even across Elasticsearch versions
- Running benchmarks and recording results
- Finding performance problems by attaching so-called telemetry devices
- Comparing performance results
We have also put considerable effort in Rally to ensure that benchmarking data are reproducible.
In general, Rally works with all versions of Elasticsearch starting from 1.x. Benchmarking with plugins and benchmarking source builds will only work from Elasticsearch 5.0 onwards.
Getting Help or Contributing to Rally¶
Use our Discuss forum to provide feedback or ask questions about Rally. Please see our contribution guide on guidelines for contributors.
Source Code¶
Rally’s source code is available on Github. You can also check the changelog and the roadmap there.
Quickstart¶
Install¶
Install Python 3.4+ including pip3
, JDK 8 or 9 and git 1.9+. Then run the following command, optionally prefixed by sudo
if necessary:
pip3 install esrally
If you have any trouble or need more detailed instructions, please look in the detailed installation guide.
Configure¶
Just invoke esrally configure
.
For more detailed instructions and a detailed walkthrough see the configuration guide.
Run your first race¶
Now we’re ready to run our first race:
esrally --distribution-version=5.0.0
This will download Elasticsearch 5.0.0 and run Rally’s default track against it. After the race, a summary report is written to the command line::
------------------------------------------------------
_______ __ _____
/ ____(_)___ ____ _/ / / ___/_________ ________
/ /_ / / __ \/ __ `/ / \__ \/ ___/ __ \/ ___/ _ \
/ __/ / / / / / /_/ / / ___/ / /__/ /_/ / / / __/
/_/ /_/_/ /_/\__,_/_/ /____/\___/\____/_/ \___/
------------------------------------------------------
| Metric | Operation | Value | Unit |
|-------------------------------:|---------------------:|----------:|-------:|
| Indexing time | | 28.0997 | min |
| Merge time | | 6.84378 | min |
| Refresh time | | 3.06045 | min |
| Flush time | | 0.106517 | min |
| Merge throttle time | | 1.28193 | min |
| Median CPU usage | | 471.6 | % |
| Total Young Gen GC | | 16.237 | s |
| Total Old Gen GC | | 1.796 | s |
| Index size | | 2.60124 | GB |
| Totally written | | 11.8144 | GB |
| Heap used for segments | | 14.7326 | MB |
| Heap used for doc values | | 0.115917 | MB |
| Heap used for terms | | 13.3203 | MB |
| Heap used for norms | | 0.0734253 | MB |
| Heap used for points | | 0.5793 | MB |
| Heap used for stored fields | | 0.643608 | MB |
| Segment count | | 97 | |
| Min Throughput | index-append | 31925.2 | docs/s |
| Median Throughput | index-append | 39137.5 | docs/s |
| Max Throughput | index-append | 39633.6 | docs/s |
| 50.0th percentile latency | index-append | 872.513 | ms |
| 90.0th percentile latency | index-append | 1457.13 | ms |
| 99.0th percentile latency | index-append | 1874.89 | ms |
| 100th percentile latency | index-append | 2711.71 | ms |
| 50.0th percentile service time | index-append | 872.513 | ms |
| 90.0th percentile service time | index-append | 1457.13 | ms |
| 99.0th percentile service time | index-append | 1874.89 | ms |
| 100th percentile service time | index-append | 2711.71 | ms |
| ... | ... | ... | ... |
| ... | ... | ... | ... |
| Min Throughput | painless_dynamic | 2.53292 | ops/s |
| Median Throughput | painless_dynamic | 2.53813 | ops/s |
| Max Throughput | painless_dynamic | 2.54401 | ops/s |
| 50.0th percentile latency | painless_dynamic | 172208 | ms |
| 90.0th percentile latency | painless_dynamic | 310401 | ms |
| 99.0th percentile latency | painless_dynamic | 341341 | ms |
| 99.9th percentile latency | painless_dynamic | 344404 | ms |
| 100th percentile latency | painless_dynamic | 344754 | ms |
| 50.0th percentile service time | painless_dynamic | 393.02 | ms |
| 90.0th percentile service time | painless_dynamic | 407.579 | ms |
| 99.0th percentile service time | painless_dynamic | 430.806 | ms |
| 99.9th percentile service time | painless_dynamic | 457.352 | ms |
| 100th percentile service time | painless_dynamic | 459.474 | ms |
----------------------------------
[INFO] SUCCESS (took 2634 seconds)
----------------------------------
Next steps¶
Now you can check how to run benchmarks, get a better understanding how to interpret the numbers in the summary report or start to create your own tracks. Be sure to check also the available recipes to help you understand how to solve specific problems in Rally.
Also run esrally --help
to see what options are available and keep the command line reference handy for more detailed explanations of each option.
Installation¶
This is the detailed installation guide for Rally. If you are in a hurry you can check the quickstart guide.
Prerequisites¶
Rally does not support Windows and is only actively tested on MacOS and Linux. Before installing Rally, please ensure that the following packages are installed.
Python¶
- Python 3.4 or better available as python3 on the path. Verify with:
python3 --version
. - Python3 header files (included in the Python3 development package).
pip3
available on the path. Verify withpip3 --version
.
Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install gcc python3-pip python3-dev
RHEL 6/ CentOS 6
Tested on CentOS release 6.9 (Final).
Note
You will need to enable EPEL before.
sudo yum install -y gcc python34.x86_64 python34-devel.x86_64 python34-setuptools.noarch
# installs pip as it is not available as an OS package
sudo python3 /usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/easy_install.py pip
RHEL 7 / CentOS 7
Note
You will need to enable EPEL before.
Tested on CentOS Linux release 7.4.1708 (Core).
sudo yum install -y gcc python34.x86_64 python34-devel.x86_64 python34-pip.noarch
Amazon Linux
sudo yum install -y gcc python35-pip.noarch python35-devel.x86_64
MacOS
We recommend that you use Homebrew:
brew install python3
git¶
git 1.9
or better is required. Verify with git --version
.
Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install git
Red Hat / CentOS / Amazon Linux
sudo yum install git
Note
If you use RHEL, please ensure to install a recent version of git via the Red Hat Software Collections.
MacOS
git
is already installed on MacOS.
JDK¶
A JDK is required on all machines where you want to launch Elasticsearch. If you use Rally just as a load generator, no JDK is required.
We recommend to use Oracle JDK but you are free to use OpenJDK as well. For details on how to install a JDK, please see your Linux distribution’s documentation pages.
Installing Rally¶
Simply install Rally with pip: pip3 install esrally
Note
Depending on your system setup you may need to prepend this command with sudo
.
If you get errors during installation, it is probably due to the installation of psutil
which we use to gather system metrics like CPU utilization. Please check the installation instructions of psutil in this case. Keep in mind that Rally is based on Python 3 and you need to install the Python 3 header files instead of the Python 2 header files on Linux.
Non-sudo Install¶
If you don’t want to use sudo
when installing Rally, installation is still possible but a little more involved:
- Specify the
--user
option when installing Rally (step 2 above), so the command to be issued is:python3 setup.py develop --user
. - Check the output of the install script or lookup the Python documentation on the variable site.USER_BASE to find out where the script is located. On Linux, this is typically
~/.local/bin
.
You can now either add ~/.local/bin
to your path or invoke Rally via ~/.local/bin/esrally
instead of just esrally
.
VirtualEnv Install¶
You can also use Virtualenv to install Rally into an isolated Python environment without sudo.
- Set up a new virtualenv environment in a directory with
virtualenv --python=python3 .
- Activate the environment with
source /path/to/virtualenv/dir/bin/activate
- Install Rally with
pip install esrally
Whenever you want to use Rally, run the activation script (step 2 above) first. When you are done, simply execute deactivate
in the shell to exit the virtual environment.
Offline Install¶
If you are in a corporate environment where your servers do not have any access to the Internet, you can use Rally’s offline installation package. Follow these steps to install Rally:
- Install all prerequisites as documented above.
- Download the offline installation package for the latest release and copy it to the target machine(s).
- Decompress the installation package with
tar -xzf esrally-dist-*.tar.gz
. - Run the install script with
sudo ./esrally-dist-*/install.sh
.
Next Steps¶
After you have installed Rally, you need to configure it. Just run esrally configure
or follow the configuration help page for more guidance.
Configuration¶
Rally has to be configured once after installation. If you just run esrally
after installing Rally, it will detect that the configuration file is missing and asks you a few questions.
If you want to reconfigure Rally at any later time, just run esrally configure
again.
Simple Configuration¶
By default, Rally will run a simpler configuration routine and autodetect as much settings as possible or choose defaults for you. If you need more control you can run Rally with esrally configure --advanced-config
.
Rally can build Elasticsearch either from sources or use an official binary distribution. If you have Rally build Elasticsearch from sources, it can only be used to benchmark Elasticsearch 5.0 and above. The reason is that with Elasticsearch 5.0 the build tool was switched from Maven to Gradle. As Rally only supports Gradle, it is limited to Elasticsearch 5.0 and above.
If you want to build Elasticsearch from sources, Gradle needs to be installed prior to running the configuration routine.
Let’s go through an example step by step: First run esrally
:
dm@io:~ $ esrally
____ ____
/ __ \____ _/ / /_ __
/ /_/ / __ `/ / / / / /
/ _, _/ /_/ / / / /_/ /
/_/ |_|\__,_/_/_/\__, /
/____/
Running simple configuration. You can run the advanced configuration with:
esrally configure --advanced-config
* Autodetecting available third-party software
git : [OK]
gradle : [OK]
JDK : [OK]
* Setting up benchmark data directory in /Users/dm/.rally/benchmarks
As you can see above, Rally autodetects if git, Gradle and a JDK are installed. If you don’t have Gradle, that’s no problem, you are just not able to build Elasticsearch from sources. Let’s assume you don’t have Gradle installed:
dm@io:~ $ esrally
____ ____
/ __ \____ _/ / /_ __
/ /_/ / __ `/ / / / / /
/ _, _/ /_/ / / / /_/ /
/_/ |_|\__,_/_/_/\__, /
/____/
Running simple configuration. You can run the advanced configuration with:
esrally configure --advanced-config
* Autodetecting available third-party software
git : [OK]
gradle : [MISSING]
JDK 8 : [OK]
********************************************************************************
You don't have the required software to benchmark Elasticsearch source builds.
You can still benchmark binary distributions with e.g.:
esrally --distribution-version=5.0.0
********************************************************************************
As you can see, Rally tells you that you cannot build Elasticsearch from sources but you can still benchmark official binary distributions.
It’s also possible that Rally cannot automatically find your JDK 8 or JDK 9 home directory. In that case, it will ask you later in the configuration process. If you do not provide a JDK home directory, Rally cannot start Elasticsearch on this machine but you can still benchmark remote clusters.
After running the initial detection, Rally will try to autodetect your Elasticsearch project directory (either in the current directory or in ../elasticsearch
) or will choose a default directory:
* Setting up benchmark data directory in /Users/dm/.rally/benchmarks
* Setting up benchmark source directory in /Users/dm/.rally/benchmarks/src/elasticsearch
If Rally has not found Gradle in the first step, it will not ask you for a source directory and just go on.
Now Rally is done:
Configuration successfully written to /Users/dm/.rally/rally.ini. Happy benchmarking!
To benchmark Elasticsearch with the default benchmark, run:
esrally
More info about Rally:
* Type esrally --help
* Read the documentation at https://esrally.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
* Ask a question on the forum at https://discuss.elastic.co/c/elasticsearch/rally
Congratulations! Time to run your first benchmark.
Advanced Configuration¶
If you need more control over a few variables or want to store your metrics in a dedicated Elasticsearch metrics store, then you should run the advanced configuration routine. You can invoke it at any time with esrally configure --advanced-config
.
Prerequisites¶
When using the advanced configuration, you can choose that Rally stores its metrics not in-memory but in a dedicated Elasticsearch instance. Therefore, you will also need the following software installed:
- Elasticsearch: a dedicated Elasticsearch instance which acts as the metrics store for Rally. If you don’t want to set it up yourself you can also use Elastic Cloud.
- Optional: Kibana (also included in Elastic Cloud).
Preparation¶
First install Elasticsearch 5.0 or higher. A simple out-of-the-box installation with a single node will suffice. Rally uses this instance to store metrics data. It will setup the necessary indices by itself. The configuration procedure of Rally will you ask for host and port of this cluster.
Note
Rally will choose the port range 39200-39300 (HTTP) and 39300-39400 (transport) for the benchmark cluster, so please ensure that this port range is not used by the metrics store.
Optional but recommended is to install also Kibana. However, note that Kibana will not be auto-configured by Rally.
Configuration Options¶
Rally will ask you a few more things in the advanced setup:
- Benchmark data directory: Rally stores all benchmark related data in this directory which can take up to several tens of GB. If you want to use a dedicated partition, you can specify a different data directory here.
- Elasticsearch project directory: This is the directory where the Elasticsearch sources are located. If you don’t actively develop on Elasticsearch you can just leave the default but if you want to benchmark local changes you should point Rally to your project directory. Note that Rally will run builds with Gradle in this directory (it runs
gradle clean
andgradle :distribution:tar:assemble
). - JDK root directory: Rally will only ask this if it could not autodetect the JDK home by itself. Just enter the root directory of the JDK you want to use. By default, Rally will choose Java 9 if available and fallback to Java 8.
- metrics store type: You can choose between
in-memory
which requires no additional setup orelasticsearch
which requires that you start a dedicated Elasticsearch instance to store metrics but gives you much more flexibility to analyse results. - metrics store settings (only for metrics store type
elasticsearch
): Provide the connection details to the Elasticsearch metrics store. This should be an instance that you use just for Rally but it can be a rather small one. A single node cluster with default setting should do it. - Name for this benchmark environment (only for metrics store type
elasticsearch
): You can use the same metrics store for multiple environments (e.g. local, continuous integration etc.) so you can separate metrics from different environments by choosing a different name. - whether or not Rally should keep the Elasticsearch benchmark candidate installation including all data by default. This will use lots of disk space so you should wipe
~/.rally/benchmarks/races
regularly.
Proxy Configuration¶
Rally downloads all necessary data automatically for you:
- Elasticsearch distributions from elastic.co if you specify
--distribution-version=SOME_VERSION_NUMBER
- Elasticsearch source code from Github if you specify a revision number e.g.
--revision=952097b
- Track meta-data from Github
- Track data from an S3 bucket
Hence, it needs to connect via http(s) to the outside world. If you are behind a corporate proxy you need to configure Rally and git. As many other Unix programs, Rally relies that the HTTP proxy URL is available in the environment variable http_proxy
(note that this is in lower-case). Hence, you should add this line to your shell profile, e.g. ~/.bash_profile
:
export http_proxy=http://proxy.acme.org:8888/
Afterwards, source the shell profile with source ~/.bash_profile
and verify that the proxy URL is correctly set with echo $http_proxy
.
Finally, you can set up git:
git config --global http.proxy $http_proxy
For details, please refer to the Git config documentation.
Please verify that the proxy setup for git works correctly by cloning any repository, e.g. the rally-tracks
repository:
git clone https://github.com/elastic/rally-tracks.git
If the configuration is correct, git will clone this repository. You can delete the folder rally-tracks
after this verification step.
To verify that Rally will connect via the proxy server you can check the log file. If the proxy server is configured successfully, Rally will log the following line on startup:
Rally connects via proxy URL [http://proxy.acme.org:3128/] to the Internet (picked up from the environment variable [http_proxy]).
Note
Rally will use this proxy server only for downloading benchmark-related data. It will not use this proxy for the actual benchmark.
Running Races¶
A “race” in Rally is the execution of a benchmarking experiment. You can use different data sets (which we call tracks) for your benchmarks.
List Tracks¶
Start by finding out which tracks are available:
esrally list tracks
This will show the following list:
Name Description Documents Compressed Size Uncompressed Size Default Challenge All Challenges
---------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------- ----------------- ------------------- ----------------------- --------------------------
geonames Standard track in Rally (11.4M POIs from Geonames) 11396505 252.4 MB 3.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,app...
geopoint 60.8M POIs from PlanetOSM 60844404 481.9 MB 2.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,app...
logging Logging benchmark 247249096 1.2 GB 31.1 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,app...
nested Nested query benchmark using up to 11,203,029 questions from StackOverflow 11203029 663.1 MB 3.4 GB nested-search-challenge nested-search-challenge...
nyc_taxis Trip records completed in yellow and green taxis in New York in 2015 165346692 4.5 GB 74.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,app...
percolator Percolator benchmark based on 2M AOL queries 2000000 102.7 kB 104.9 MB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,app...
pmc Full text benchmark containing 574.199 papers from PMC 574199 5.5 GB 21.7 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,app...
The first two columns show the name and a short description of each track. A track also specifies one or more challenges which basically defines the operations that will be run.
Starting a Race¶
Note
Do not run Rally as root as Elasticsearch will refuse to start with root privileges.
To start a race you have to define the track and challenge to run. For example:
esrally --distribution-version=5.0.0 --track=geopoint --challenge=append-fast-with-conflicts
Rally will then start racing on this track. If you have never started Rally before, it should look similar to the following output:
dm@io:~ $ esrally --distribution-version=5.0.0 --track=geopoint --challenge=append-fast-with-conflicts
____ ____
/ __ \____ _/ / /_ __
/ /_/ / __ `/ / / / / /
/ _, _/ /_/ / / / /_/ /
/_/ |_|\__,_/_/_/\__, /
/____/
[INFO] Racing on track [geopoint], challenge [append-fast-with-conflicts] and car [defaults]
[INFO] Downloading Elasticsearch 5.0.0 ... [OK]
[INFO] Rally will delete the benchmark candidate after the benchmark
[INFO] Downloading data from [http://benchmarks.elasticsearch.org.s3.amazonaws.com/corpora/geopoint/documents.json.bz2] (482 MB) to [/Users/dm/.rally/benchmarks/data/geopoint/documents.json.bz2] ... [OK]
[INFO] Decompressing track data from [/Users/dm/.rally/benchmarks/data/geopoint/documents.json.bz2] to [/Users/dm/.rally/benchmarks/data/geopoint/documents.json] (resulting size: 2.28 GB) ... [OK]
[INFO] Preparing file offset table for [/Users/dm/.rally/benchmarks/data/geopoint/documents.json] ... [OK]
Running index-update [ 0% done]
Please be patient as it will take a while to run the benchmark.
When the race has finished, Rally will show a summary on the command line:
| Metric | Operation | Value | Unit |
|--------------------------------:|-------------:|----------:|-------:|
| Indexing time | | 124.712 | min |
| Merge time | | 21.8604 | min |
| Refresh time | | 4.49527 | min |
| Merge throttle time | | 0.120433 | min |
| Median CPU usage | | 546.5 | % |
| Total Young Gen GC | | 72.078 | s |
| Total Old Gen GC | | 3.426 | s |
| Index size | | 2.26661 | GB |
| Totally written | | 30.083 | GB |
| Heap used for segments | | 10.7148 | MB |
| Heap used for doc values | | 0.0135536 | MB |
| Heap used for terms | | 9.22965 | MB |
| Heap used for points | | 0.78789 | MB |
| Heap used for stored fields | | 0.683708 | MB |
| Segment count | | 115 | |
| Min Throughput | index-update | 59210.4 | docs/s |
| Median Throughput | index-update | 65276.2 | docs/s |
| Max Throughput | index-update | 76516.6 | docs/s |
| 50.0th percentile latency | index-update | 556.269 | ms |
| 90.0th percentile latency | index-update | 852.779 | ms |
| 99.0th percentile latency | index-update | 1854.31 | ms |
| 99.9th percentile latency | index-update | 2972.96 | ms |
| 99.99th percentile latency | index-update | 4106.91 | ms |
| 100th percentile latency | index-update | 4542.84 | ms |
| 50.0th percentile service time | index-update | 556.269 | ms |
| 90.0th percentile service time | index-update | 852.779 | ms |
| 99.0th percentile service time | index-update | 1854.31 | ms |
| 99.9th percentile service time | index-update | 2972.96 | ms |
| 99.99th percentile service time | index-update | 4106.91 | ms |
| 100th percentile service time | index-update | 4542.84 | ms |
| Min Throughput | force-merge | 0.221067 | ops/s |
| Median Throughput | force-merge | 0.221067 | ops/s |
| Max Throughput | force-merge | 0.221067 | ops/s |
| 100th percentile latency | force-merge | 4523.52 | ms |
| 100th percentile service time | force-merge | 4523.52 | ms |
----------------------------------
[INFO] SUCCESS (took 1624 seconds)
----------------------------------
Note
You can save this report also to a file by using --report-file=/path/to/your/report.md
and save it as CSV with --report-format=csv
.
What did Rally just do?
- It downloaded and started Elasticsearch 5.0.0
- It downloaded the relevant data for the geopoint track
- It ran the actual benchmark
- And finally it reported the results
If you are curious about the operations that Rally has run, please inspect the geopoint track specification or start to write your own tracks. You can also configure Rally to store all data samples in Elasticsearch so you can analyze the results with Kibana. Finally, you may want to change the Elasticsearch configuration.
Tournaments¶
Suppose, we want to analyze the impact of a performance improvement. First, we need a baseline measurement. We can use the command line parameter --user-tag
to provide a key-value pair to document the intent of a race. After we’ve run both races, we want to know about the performance impact of a change. With Rally we can analyze differences of two given races easily. First of all, we need to find two races to compare by issuing esrally list races
:
dm@io:~ $ esrally list races
____ ____
/ __ \____ _/ / /_ __
/ /_/ / __ `/ / / / / /
/ _, _/ /_/ / / / /_/ /
/_/ |_|\__,_/_/_/\__, /
/____/
Recent races:
Race Timestamp Track Challenge Car User Tag
---------------- ------- ------------------- -------- ------------------------------
20160518T122341Z pmc append-no-conflicts defaults intention:reduce_alloc_1234
20160518T112057Z pmc append-no-conflicts defaults intention:baseline_github_1234
20160518T101957Z pmc append-no-conflicts defaults
We can see that the user tag helps us to recognize races. We want to compare the two most recent races and have to provide the two race timestamps in the next step:
dm@io:~ $ esrally compare --baseline=20160518T112057Z --contender=20160518T112341Z
____ ____
/ __ \____ _/ / /_ __
/ /_/ / __ `/ / / / / /
/ _, _/ /_/ / / / /_/ /
/_/ |_|\__,_/_/_/\__, /
/____/
Comparing baseline
Race timestamp: 2016-05-18 11:20:57
Challenge: append-no-conflicts
Car: defaults
with contender
Race timestamp: 2016-05-18 12:23:41
Challenge: append-no-conflicts
Car: defaults
------------------------------------------------------
_______ __ _____
/ ____(_)___ ____ _/ / / ___/_________ ________
/ /_ / / __ \/ __ `/ / \__ \/ ___/ __ \/ ___/ _ \
/ __/ / / / / / /_/ / / ___/ / /__/ /_/ / / / __/
/_/ /_/_/ /_/\__,_/_/ /____/\___/\____/_/ \___/
------------------------------------------------------
Metric Baseline Contender Diff
-------------------------------------------------------- ---------- ----------- -----------------
Min Indexing Throughput [docs/s] 19501 19118 -383.00000
Median Indexing Throughput [docs/s] 20232 19927.5 -304.45833
Max Indexing Throughput [docs/s] 21172 20849 -323.00000
Indexing time [min] 55.7989 56.335 +0.53603
Merge time [min] 12.9766 13.3115 +0.33495
Refresh time [min] 5.20067 5.20097 +0.00030
Flush time [min] 0.0648667 0.0681833 +0.00332
Merge throttle time [min] 0.796417 0.879267 +0.08285
Query latency term (50.0 percentile) [ms] 2.10049 2.15421 +0.05372
Query latency term (90.0 percentile) [ms] 2.77537 2.84168 +0.06630
Query latency term (100.0 percentile) [ms] 4.52081 5.15368 +0.63287
Query latency country_agg (50.0 percentile) [ms] 112.049 110.385 -1.66392
Query latency country_agg (90.0 percentile) [ms] 128.426 124.005 -4.42138
Query latency country_agg (100.0 percentile) [ms] 155.989 133.797 -22.19185
Query latency scroll (50.0 percentile) [ms] 16.1226 14.4974 -1.62519
Query latency scroll (90.0 percentile) [ms] 17.2383 15.4079 -1.83043
Query latency scroll (100.0 percentile) [ms] 18.8419 18.4241 -0.41784
Query latency country_agg_cached (50.0 percentile) [ms] 1.70223 1.64502 -0.05721
Query latency country_agg_cached (90.0 percentile) [ms] 2.34819 2.04318 -0.30500
Query latency country_agg_cached (100.0 percentile) [ms] 3.42547 2.86814 -0.55732
Query latency default (50.0 percentile) [ms] 5.89058 5.83409 -0.05648
Query latency default (90.0 percentile) [ms] 6.71282 6.64662 -0.06620
Query latency default (100.0 percentile) [ms] 7.65307 7.3701 -0.28297
Query latency phrase (50.0 percentile) [ms] 1.82687 1.83193 +0.00506
Query latency phrase (90.0 percentile) [ms] 2.63714 2.46286 -0.17428
Query latency phrase (100.0 percentile) [ms] 5.39892 4.22367 -1.17525
Median CPU usage (index) [%] 668.025 679.15 +11.12499
Median CPU usage (stats) [%] 143.75 162.4 +18.64999
Median CPU usage (search) [%] 223.1 229.2 +6.10000
Total Young Gen GC [s] 39.447 40.456 +1.00900
Total Old Gen GC [s] 7.108 7.703 +0.59500
Index size [GB] 3.25475 3.25098 -0.00377
Totally written [GB] 17.8434 18.3143 +0.47083
Heap used for segments [MB] 21.7504 21.5901 -0.16037
Heap used for doc values [MB] 0.16436 0.13905 -0.02531
Heap used for terms [MB] 20.0293 19.9159 -0.11345
Heap used for norms [MB] 0.105469 0.0935669 -0.01190
Heap used for points [MB] 0.773487 0.772155 -0.00133
Heap used for points [MB] 0.677795 0.669426 -0.00837
Segment count 136 121 -15.00000
Indices Stats(90.0 percentile) [ms] 3.16053 3.21023 +0.04969
Indices Stats(99.0 percentile) [ms] 5.29526 3.94132 -1.35393
Indices Stats(100.0 percentile) [ms] 5.64971 7.02374 +1.37403
Nodes Stats(90.0 percentile) [ms] 3.19611 3.15251 -0.04360
Nodes Stats(99.0 percentile) [ms] 4.44111 4.87003 +0.42892
Nodes Stats(100.0 percentile) [ms] 5.22527 5.66977 +0.44450
Recipes¶
Benchmarking an existing cluster¶
Warning
If you are just getting started with Rally and don’t understand how it works, please do NOT run it against any production or production-like cluster. Besides, benchmarks should be executed in a dedicated environment anyway where no additional traffic skews results.
Note
We assume in this recipe, that Rally is already properly configured.
Consider the following configuration: You have an existing benchmarking cluster, that consists of three Elasticsearch nodes running on 10.5.5.10
, 10.5.5.11
, 10.5.5.12
. You’ve setup the cluster yourself and want to benchmark it with Rally. Rally is installed on 10.5.5.5
.
First of all, we need to decide on a track. So, we run esrally list tracks
:
Name Description Documents Compressed Size Uncompressed Size Default Challenge All Challenges
---------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------- ----------------- ------------------- ----------------------- --------------------------
geonames Standard track in Rally (11.4M POIs from Geonames) 11396505 252.4 MB 3.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,app...
geopoint 60.8M POIs from PlanetOSM 60844404 481.9 MB 2.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,app...
logging Logging benchmark 247249096 1.2 GB 31.1 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,app...
nested Nested query benchmark using up to 11,203,029 questions from StackOverflow 11203029 663.1 MB 3.4 GB nested-search-challenge nested-search-challenge...
nyc_taxis Trip records completed in yellow and green taxis in New York in 2015 165346692 4.5 GB 74.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,app...
percolator Percolator benchmark based on 2M AOL queries 2000000 102.7 kB 104.9 MB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,app...
pmc Full text benchmark containing 574.199 papers from PMC 574199 5.5 GB 21.7 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,app...
We’re interested in a full text benchmark, so we’ll choose to run pmc
. If you have your own data that you want to use for benchmarks, then please create your own track instead; the metrics you’ll gather which be representative and much more useful than some default track.
Next, we need to know which machines to target which is easy as we can see that from the diagram above.
Finally we need to check which pipeline to use. For this case, the benchmark-only
pipeline is suitable as we don’t want Rally to provision the cluster for us.
Now we can invoke Rally:
esrally --track=pmc --target-hosts=10.5.5.10:9200,10.5.5.11:9200,10.5.5.12:9200 --pipeline=benchmark-only
If you have X-Pack Security enabled, then you’ll also need to specify another parameter to use https and to pass credentials:
esrally --track=pmc --target-hosts=10.5.5.10:9243,10.5.5.11:9243,10.5.5.12:9243 --pipeline=benchmark-only --client-options="use_ssl:true,verify_certs:true,basic_auth_user:'elastic',basic_auth_password:'changeme'"
Benchmarking a remote cluster¶
Contrary to the previous recipe, you want Rally to provision all cluster nodes.
We will use the following configuration for the example:
- You will start Rally on
10.5.5.5
. We will call this machine the “benchmark coordinator”. - Your Elasticsearch cluster will consist of two nodes which run on
10.5.5.10
and10.5.5.11
. We will call these machines the “benchmark candidate”s.
Note
All esrallyd
nodes form a cluster that communicates via the “benchmark coordinator”. For aesthetic reasons we do not show a direct connection between the “benchmark coordinator” and all nodes.
To run a benchmark for this scenario follow these steps:
- Install and configure Rally on all machines. Be sure that the same version is installed on all of them and fully configured.
- Start the Rally daemon on each machine. The Rally daemon allows Rally to communicate with all remote machines. On the benchmark coordinator run
esrallyd start --node-ip=10.5.5.5 --coordinator-ip=10.5.5.5
and on the benchmark candidate machines runesrallyd start --node-ip=10.5.5.10 --coordinator-ip=10.5.5.5
andesrallyd start --node-ip=10.5.5.11 --coordinator-ip=10.5.5.5
respectively. The--node-ip
parameter tells Rally the IP of the machine on which it is running. As some machines have more than one network interface, Rally will not attempt to auto-detect the machine IP. The--coordinator-ip
parameter tells Rally the IP of the benchmark coordinator node. - Start the benchmark by invoking Rally as usual on the benchmark coordinator, for example:
esrally --distribution-version=5.0.0 --target-hosts=10.5.5.10:9200,10.5.5.11:9200
. Rally will derive from the--target-hosts
parameter that it should provision the nodes10.5.5.10
and10.5.5.11
. - After the benchmark has finished you can stop the Rally daemon again. On the benchmark coordinator and on the benchmark candidates run
esrallyd stop
.
Note
Logs are managed per machine, so all relevant log files and also telemetry output is stored on the benchmark candidates but not on the benchmark coordinator.
Now you might ask yourself what the differences to benchmarks of existing clusters are. In general you should aim to give Rally as much control as possible as benchmark are easier reproducible and you get more metrics. The following table provides some guidance on when to choose which option:
Your requirement | Recommendation |
---|---|
You want to use Rally’s telemetry devices | Use Rally daemon, as it can provision the remote node for you |
You want to benchmark a source build of Elasticsearch | Use Rally daemon, as it can build Elasticsearch for you |
You want to tweak the cluster configuration yourself | Use Rally daemon with a custom configuration or set up the cluster by yourself and use --pipeline=benchmark-only |
You need to run a benchmark with plugins | Use Rally daemon if the plugins are supported or set up the cluster by yourself and use --pipeline=benchmark-only |
You need to run a benchmark against multiple nodes | Use Rally daemon if all nodes can be configured identically. For more complex cases, set up the cluster by yourself and use --pipeline=benchmark-only |
Rally daemon will be able to cover most of the cases described above in the future so there should be almost no case where you need to use the benchmark-only
pipeline.
Distributing the load test driver¶
By default, Rally will generate load on the same machine where you start a benchmark. However, when you are benchmarking larger clusters, a single load test driver machine may not be able to generate sufficient load. In these cases, you should use multiple load driver machines. We will use the following configuration for the example:
- You will start Rally on
10.5.5.5
. We will call this machine the “benchmark coordinator”. - You will start two load drivers on
10.5.5.6
and10.5.5.7
. Note that one load driver will simulate multiple clients. Rally will simply assign clients to load driver machines in a round-robin fashion. - Your Elasticsearch cluster will consist of three nodes which run on
10.5.5.11
,10.5.5.12
and10.5.5.13
. We will call these machines the “benchmark candidate”. For simplicity, we will assume an externally provisioned cluster but you can also use Rally to setup the cluster for you (see above).
- Install and configure Rally on all machines. Be sure that the same version is installed on all of them and fully configured.
- Start the Rally daemon on each machine. The Rally daemon allows Rally to communicate with all remote machines. On the benchmark coordinator run
esrallyd start --node-ip=10.5.5.5 --coordinator-ip=10.5.5.5
and on the load driver machines runesrallyd start --node-ip=10.5.5.6 --coordinator-ip=10.5.5.5
andesrallyd start --node-ip=10.5.5.7 --coordinator-ip=10.5.5.5
respectively. The--node-ip
parameter tells Rally the IP of the machine on which it is running. As some machines have more than one network interface, Rally will not attempt to auto-detect the machine IP. The--coordinator-ip
parameter tells Rally the IP of the benchmark coordinator node. - Start the benchmark by invoking Rally on the benchmark coordinator, for example:
esrally --pipeline=benchmark-only --load-driver-hosts=10.5.5.6,10.5.5.7 --target-hosts=10.5.5.11:9200,10.5.5.12:9200,10.5.5.13:9200
. - After the benchmark has finished you can stop the Rally daemon again. On the benchmark coordinator and on the load driver machines run
esrallyd stop
.
Note
Rally neither distributes code (i.e. custom runners or parameter sources) nor data automatically. You should place all tracks and their data on all machines in the same directory before starting the benchmark. Alternatively, you can store your track in a custom track repository.
Note
As indicated in the diagram, track data will be downloaded by each load driver machine separately. If you want to avoid that, you can run a benchmark once without distributing the load test driver (i.e. do not specify --load-driver-hosts
) and then copy the contents of ~/.rally/benchmarks/data
to all load driver machines.
Changing the default track repository¶
Rally supports multiple track repositories. This allows you for example to have a separate company-internal repository for your own tracks that is separate from Rally’s default track repository. However, you always need to define --track-repository=my-custom-repository
which can be cumbersome. If you want to avoid that and want Rally to use your own track repository by default you can just replace the default track repository definition in ~./rally/rally.ini
. Consider this example:
...
[tracks]
default.url = git@github.com:elastic/rally-tracks.git
teamtrackrepo.url = git@example.org/myteam/my-tracks.git
If teamtrackrepo
should be the default track repository, just define it as default.url
. E.g.:
...
[tracks]
default.url = git@example.org/myteam/my-tracks.git
old-rally-default.url=git@github.com:elastic/rally-tracks.git
Also don’t forget to rename the folder of your local working copy as Rally will search for a track repository with the name default
:
cd ~/.rally/benchmarks/tracks/
mv default old-rally-default
mv teamtrackrepo default
From now on, Rally will treat your repository as default and you need to run Rally with --track-repository=old-rally-default
if you want to use the out-of-the-box Rally tracks.
Developing Rally¶
Prerequisites¶
Please ensure that the following packages are installed before installing Rally in development mode:
- Python 3.4 or better available as
python3
on the path (verify with:python3 --version
) pip3
available on the path (verify withpip3 --version
)- JDK 8 or 9
- git 1.9 or better
- Gradle 3.3 or better
Please check the installation guide for detailed installation instructions for these packages.
Rally does not support Windows and is only actively tested on MacOS and Linux.
Installation Instructions for Development¶
git clone https://github.com/elastic/rally.git
cd rally
./rally
If you get errors during installation, it is probably due to the installation of psutil
which we use to gather system metrics like CPU utilization. Please check the installation instructions of psutil in this case. Keep in mind that Rally is based on Python 3 and you need to install the Python 3 header files instead of the Python 2 header files on Linux.
Automatic Updates¶
Rally has a built-in auto-update feature when you install it from sources. By default, it will update from the remote named origin
. If you want to auto-update from a different remote, provide --update-from-remote=YOUR_REMOTE_NAME
as first parameter.
To work conveniently with Rally, we suggest that you add the Rally project directory to your PATH
. In case you use a different remote, you should also define aliases in your shell’s config file, e.g.:
alias rally='rally --update-from-remote=elastic '
alias rallyd='rallyd --update-from-remote=elastic '
Then you can invoke Rally or the Rally daemon as usual and have auto-update still work.
Also note that automatic updates are disabled in the following cases:
- There are local (uncommitted) changes in the Rally project directory
- A different branch than
master
is checked out - You have specified
--skip-update
as the first command line parameter - You have specified
--offline
as a command line parameter for Rally
Configuring Rally¶
Before we can run our first benchmark, we have to configure Rally. Just invoke ./rally configure
and Rally will automatically detect that its configuration file is missing and prompt you for some values and write them to ~/.rally/rally.ini
. After you’ve configured Rally, it will exit.
For more information see configuration help page.
Key Components of Rally¶
To get a rough understanding of Rally, it makes sense to get to know its key components:
- Race Control: is responsible for proper execution of the race. It sets up all components and acts as a high-level controller.
- Mechanic: can build and prepare a benchmark candidate for the race. It checks out the source, builds Elasticsearch, provisions and starts the cluster.
- Track: is a concrete benchmarking scenario, e.g. the logging benchmark. It defines the data set to use.
- Challenge: is the specification on what benchmarks should be run and its configuration (e.g. index, then run a search benchmark with 1000 iterations)
- Car: is a concrete system configuration for a benchmark, e.g. an Elasticsearch single-node cluster with default settings.
- Driver: drives the race, i.e. it is executing the benchmark according to the track specification.
- Reporter: A reporter tells us how the race went (currently only after the fact).
There is a dedicated tutorial on how to add new tracks to Rally.
How to contribute code¶
First of all, please read the contributors guide.
We strive to be PEP-8 compliant but don’t follow it to the letter.
Creating custom tracks¶
Note
Please see the track reference for more information on the structure of a track.
Example track¶
Let’s create an example track step by step. We will call this track “tutorial”. The track consists of two components: the data set and the actual track specification which describes the workload that Rally should apply. We will store everything in the directory ~/rally-tracks/tutorial
but you can choose any other location.
First, we need some data. Geonames provides geo data under a creative commons license. We will download allCountries.zip (around 300MB), extract it and inspect allCountries.txt
.
You will note that the file is tab-delimited but we need JSON to bulk-index data with Elasticsearch. So we can use a small script to do the conversion for us:
import json
cols = (("geonameid", "int"),
("name", "string"),
("asciiname", "string"),
("alternatenames", "string"),
("latitude", "double"),
("longitude", "double"),
("feature_class", "string"),
("feature_code", "string"),
("country_code", "string"),
("cc2", "string"),
("admin1_code", "string"),
("admin2_code", "string"),
("admin3_code", "string"),
("admin4_code", "string"),
("population", "long"),
("elevation", "int"),
("dem", "string"),
("timezone", "string"))
def main():
with open("allCountries.txt", "rt", encoding="UTF-8") as f:
for line in f:
tup = line.strip().split("\t")
record = {}
for i in range(len(cols)):
name, type = cols[i]
if tup[i] != "":
if type in ("int", "long"):
record[name] = int(tup[i])
elif type == "double":
record[name] = float(tup[i])
else:
record[name] = tup[i]
print(json.dumps(record, ensure_ascii=False))
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()
Store the script as toJSON.py
in our tutorial directory (~/rally-tracks/tutorial
) and invoke the script with python3 toJSON.py > documents.json
.
We also need a mapping file for our documents. For details on how to write a mapping file, see the Elasticsearch documentation on mappings and look at an example mapping file. Place the mapping file in the tutorial directory.
Finally, add a file called track.json
right next to the mapping file:
{
"short-description": "Tutorial benchmark for Rally",
"description": "This test indexes 8.6 million documents (POIs from Geonames) using 8 clients and 5000 docs per bulk request against Elasticsearch",
"indices": [
{
"name": "geonames",
"types": [
{
"name": "type",
"mapping": "mappings.json",
"documents": "documents.json",
"document-count": 8647880,
"uncompressed-bytes": 2790927196
}
]
}
],
"operations": [
{
"name": "index",
"operation-type": "index",
"bulk-size": 5000
},
{
"name": "force-merge",
"operation-type": "force-merge"
},
{
"name": "query-match-all",
"operation-type": "search",
"body": {
"query": {
"match_all": {}
}
}
}
],
"challenges": [
{
"name": "index-and-query",
"description": "",
"default": true,
"index-settings": {
"index.number_of_replicas": 0
},
"schedule": [
{
"operation": "index",
"warmup-time-period": 120,
"clients": 8
},
{
"operation": "force-merge",
"clients": 1
},
{
"operation": "query-match-all",
"clients": 8,
"warmup-iterations": 1000,
"iterations": 1000,
"target-throughput": 100
}
]
}
]
}
A few things to note:
- If you define multiple challenges, Rally will run the challenge where
default
is set totrue
. If you want to run a different challenge, provide the command line option--challenge=YOUR_CHALLENGE_NAME
. - You can add as many queries as you want. We use the official Python Elasticsearch client to issue queries.
- The numbers below the
types
property are needed to verify integrity and provide progress reports.
Note
You can store any supporting scripts along with your track. However, you need to place them in a directory starting with “_”, e.g. “_support”. Rally loads track plugins (see below) from any directory but will ignore directories starting with “_”.
Note
We have defined a JSON schema for tracks which you can use to check how to define your track. You should also check the tracks provided by Rally for inspiration.
When you invoke esrally list tracks --track-path=~/rally-tracks/tutorial
, the new track should now appear:
dm@io:~ $ esrally list tracks --track-path=~/rally-tracks/tutorial
____ ____
/ __ \____ _/ / /_ __
/ /_/ / __ `/ / / / / /
/ _, _/ /_/ / / / /_/ /
/_/ |_|\__,_/_/_/\__, /
/____/
Available tracks:
Name Description Documents Compressed Size Uncompressed Size Default Challenge All Challenges
---------- ----------------------------- ----------- --------------- ----------------- ----------------- ---------------
tutorial Tutorial benchmark for Rally 8647880 N/A 2.6 GB index-and-query index-and-query
Congratulations, you have created your first track! You can test it with esrally --track-path=~/rally-tracks/tutorial
and run specific challenges with esrally --track-path=~/rally-tracks/tutorial --challenge=index-and-query
.
Adding support for test mode¶
When you invoke Rally with --test-mode
, it switches to a mode that allows you to check your track very quickly for syntax errors. To achieve that, it will postprocess its internal track representation after loading it:
- Iteration-based tasks will run at most one warmup iteration and one measurement iteration.
- Time-period-based task will run for at most 10 seconds without any warmup.
Rally will postprocess all data file names of a track. So instead of documents.json.bz2
, Rally will attempt to find documents-1k.json.bz2
and will assume it contains 1.000 documents. However, you need to prepare these data files otherwise this test mode is not supported.
The preparation is very easy. Just pick 1.000 documents for every data file in your track. We choose the first 1.000 here but it does not matter usually which part you choose: head -n 1000 documents.json > documents-1k.json
.
Structuring your track¶
track.json
is just the entry point to a track but you can split your track as you see fit. Suppose you want to add more challenges to the track above but you want to keep them in a separate files. Let’s start by storing our challenge in a separate file, e.g in challenges/index-and-query.json
. Create the directory and store the following in index-and-query.json
:
{
"name": "index-and-query",
"description": "",
"default": true,
"index-settings": {
"index.number_of_replicas": 0
},
"schedule": [
{
"operation": "index",
"warmup-time-period": 120,
"clients": 8
},
{
"operation": "force-merge",
"clients": 1
},
{
"operation": "query-match-all",
"clients": 8,
"warmup-iterations": 1000,
"iterations": 1000,
"target-throughput": 100
}
]
}
Now modify track.json
so it knows about your new file:
{
"short-description": "Tutorial benchmark for Rally",
"description": "This test indexes 8.6 million documents (POIs from Geonames) using 8 clients and 5000 docs per bulk request against Elasticsearch",
"indices": [
{
"name": "geonames",
"types": [
{
"name": "type",
"mapping": "mappings.json",
"documents": "documents.json",
"document-count": 8647880,
"uncompressed-bytes": 2790927196
}
]
}
],
"operations": [
{
"name": "index",
"operation-type": "index",
"bulk-size": 5000
},
{
"name": "force-merge",
"operation-type": "force-merge"
},
{
"name": "query-match-all",
"operation-type": "search",
"body": {
"query": {
"match_all": {}
}
}
}
],
"challenges": [
{% include "challenges/index-and-query.json" %}
]
}
We replaced the challenge content with {% include "challenges/index-and-query.json" %}
which tells Rally to include the challenge from the provided file. You can use include
on arbitrary parts of your track.
However, if your track consists of multiple challenges it can be cumbersome to include them all explicitly. Therefore Rally brings a collect
helper that collects all related files for you. Let’s adapt our track to use it:
{% import "rally.helpers" as rally %}
{
"short-description": "Tutorial benchmark for Rally",
"description": "This test indexes 8.6 million documents (POIs from Geonames) using 8 clients and 5000 docs per bulk request against Elasticsearch",
"indices": [
{
"name": "geonames",
"types": [
{
"name": "type",
"mapping": "mappings.json",
"documents": "documents.json",
"document-count": 8647880,
"uncompressed-bytes": 2790927196
}
]
}
],
"operations": [
{
"name": "index",
"operation-type": "index",
"bulk-size": 5000
},
{
"name": "force-merge",
"operation-type": "force-merge"
},
{
"name": "query-match-all",
"operation-type": "search",
"body": {
"query": {
"match_all": {}
}
}
}
],
"challenges": [
{{ rally.collect(parts="challenges/*.json") }}
]
}
We changed two things here. First, we imported helper functions from Rally by adding {% import "rally.helpers" as rally %}
in line 1. Second, we used Rally’s collect
helper to find and include all JSON files in the “challenges” subdirectory with the statement {{ rally.collect(parts="challenges/*.json") }}
. When you add new challenges in this directory, Rally will automatically pick them up.
Note
If you want to check the final result, please check Rally’s log file. Rally will print the full rendered track there after it has loaded it successfully.
You can even use Jinja2 variables but you need to import the Rally helpers a bit differently then. You also need to declare all variables before the import
statement:
{% set clients = 16 %}
{% import "rally.helpers" as rally with context %}
If you use this idiom you can then refer to variables inside your snippets with {{ clients }}
.
Sharing your track with others¶
At the moment your track is only available on your local machine but maybe you want to share it with other people in your team. You can share the track itself in any way you want, e.g. you can check it into version control. However, you will most likely not want to commit the potentially huge data file. Therefore, you can expose the data via http (e.g. via S3) and Rally can download it from there. To make this work, you need to add an additional property data-url
at the top-level of your track.json
file which contains the URL from where to download your documents. Rally expects that the URL points to the parent path and will append the document file name automatically.
It is also recommended that you compress your document corpus to save network bandwidth. We recommend to use bzip2 compression. You can create a compressed archive with the following command:
bzip2 -9 -c documents.json > documents.json.bz2
If you want to support the test mode, don’t forget to also compress your test mode corpus with:
bzip2 -9 -c documents-1k.json > documents-1k.json.bz2
Then upload documents.json.bz2
and documents-1k.json.bz2
to the remote location.
Finally, specify the compressed file name in your track.json
file:
{
"short-description": "Tutorial benchmark for Rally",
"description": "This test indexes 8.6 million documents (POIs from Geonames) using 8 clients and 5000 docs per bulk request against Elasticsearch",
"data-url": "http://benchmarks.elasticsearch.org.s3.amazonaws.com/corpora/geonames",
"indices": [
{
"name": "geonames",
"types": [
{
"name": "type",
"mapping": "mappings.json",
"documents": "documents.json.bz2",
"document-count": 8647880,
"compressed-bytes": 197857614,
"uncompressed-bytes": 2790927196
}
]
}
],
...
}
Specifying compressed-bytes
(file size of documents.json.bz2
) and uncompressed-bytes
(file size of documents.json
) is optional but helps Rally to provide progress indicators and also verify integrity.
How to contribute a track¶
First of all, please read Rally’s contributors guide.
If you want to contribute your track, follow these steps:
- Create a track JSON file and mapping files as described above and place them in a separate folder in the
rally-tracks
repository. Please also add a README file in this folder which contains licensing information (respecting the licensing terms of the source data). Note that pull requests for tracks without a license cannot be accepted. - Upload the associated data so they can be publicly downloaded via HTTP. The data should be compressed either as .bz2 (recommended) or as .zip. Also, don’t forget to upload the “-1k” data files to support test mode properly.
- Create a pull request in the rally-tracks Github repo.
You’ve now mastered the basics of track development for Rally. It’s time to pat yourself on the back before you dive into the advanced topics!
Advanced topics¶
Template Language¶
Rally uses Jinja2 as template language. This allows you to use Jinja2 expressions in track files.
Extension Points¶
Rally also provides a few extension points to Jinja2:
now
: This is a global variable that represents the current date and time when the template is evaluated by Rally.days_ago()
: This is a filter that you can use for date calculations.
You can find an example in the logging track:
{
"name": "range",
"index": "logs-*",
"type": "type",
"body": {
"query": {
"range": {
"@timestamp": {
"gte": "now-{{'15-05-1998' | days_ago(now)}}d/d",
"lt": "now/d"
}
}
}
}
}
}
The data set that is used in the logging track starts on 26-04-1998 but we want to ignore the first few days for this query, so we start on 15-05-1998. The expression {{'15-05-1998' | days_ago(now)}}
yields the difference in days between now and the fixed start date and allows us to benchmark time range queries relative to now with a predetermined data set.
Custom parameter sources¶
Note
This is a rather new feature and the API may change! However, the effort to use custom parameter sources is very low.
Warning
Your parameter source is on a performance-critical code-path so please double-check with Rally’s profiling support that you did not introduce any bottlenecks.
Consider the following operation definition:
{
"name": "term",
"operation-type": "search",
"body": {
"query": {
"term": {
"body": "physician"
}
}
}
}
This query is defined statically in the track specification but sometimes you may want to vary parameters, e.g. search also for “mechanic” or “nurse”. In this case, you can write your own “parameter source” with a little bit of Python code.
First, define the name of your parameter source in the operation definition:
{
"name": "term",
"operation-type": "search",
"param-source": "my-custom-term-param-source"
"professions": ["mechanic", "physician", "nurse"]
}
Rally will recognize the parameter source and looks then for a file track.py
in the same directory as the corresponding JSON file. This file contains the implementation of the parameter source:
import random
def random_profession(indices, params):
# you must provide all parameters that the runner expects
return {
"body": {
"query": {
"term": {
"body": "%s" % random.choice(params["professions"])
}
}
},
"index": None,
"type": None,
"use_request_cache": False
}
def register(registry):
registry.register_param_source("my-custom-term-param-source", random_profession)
The example above shows a simple case that is sufficient if the operation to which your parameter source is applied is idempotent and it does not matter whether two clients execute the same operation.
The function random_profession
is the actual parameter source. Rally will bind the name “my-custom-term-param-source” to this function by calling register
. register
is called by Rally before the track is executed.
The parameter source function needs to declare the two parameters indices
and params
. indices contains all indices of this track and params
contains all parameters that have been defined in the operation definition in track.json
. We use it in the example to read the professions to choose.
If you need more control, you need to implement a class. The example above, implemented as a class looks as follows:
import random
class TermParamSource:
def __init__(self, indices, params):
self._indices = indices
self._params = params
def partition(self, partition_index, total_partitions):
return self
def size(self):
return 1
def params(self):
# you must provide all parameters that the runner expects
return {
"body": {
"query": {
"term": {
"body": "%s" % random.choice(self._params["professions"])
}
}
},
"index": None,
"type": None,
"use_request_cache": False
}
def register(registry):
registry.register_param_source("my-custom-term-param-source", TermParamSource)
Let’s walk through this code step by step:
Note the method
register
where you need to bind the name in the track specification to your parameter source implementation class similar to the simple example.The class
TermParamSource
is the actual parameter source and needs to fulfill a few requirements:- It needs to have a constructor with the signature
__init__(self, indices, params)
. You don’t need to store these parameters if you don’t need them. partition(self, partition_index, total_partitions)
is called by Rally to “assign” the parameter source across multiple clients. Typically you can just returnself
but in certain cases you need to do something more sophisticated. If each clients needs to act differently then you can provide different parameter source instances here.size(self)
: This method is needed to help Rally provide a proper progress indication to users if you use a warmup time period. For bulk indexing, this would return the number of bulks (for a given client). As searches are typically executed with a pre-determined amount of iterations, just return1
in this case.params(self)
: This method needs to return a dictionary with all parameters that the corresponding “runner” expects. For the standard case, Rally provides most of these parameters as a convenience, but here you need to define all of them yourself. This method will be invoked once for every iteration during the race. We can see that we randomly select a profession from a list which will be then be executed by the corresponding runner.
- It needs to have a constructor with the signature
Note
Be aware that params(self)
is called on a performance-critical path so don’t do anything in this method that takes a lot of time (avoid any I/O). For searches, you should usually throttle throughput anyway and there it does not matter that much but if the corresponding operation is run without throughput throttling, please double-check that you did not introduce a bottleneck in the load test driver with your custom parameter source.
In the implementation of custom parameter sources you can access the Python standard API. Using any additional libraries is not supported.
You can also implement your parameter sources and runners in multiple Python files but the main entry point is always track.py
. The root package name of your plugin is the name of your track.
Custom runners¶
Warning
Your runner is on a performance-critical code-path so please double-check with Rally’s profiling support that you did not introduce any bottlenecks.
You cannot only define custom parameter sources but also custom runners. Runners execute an operation against Elasticsearch. Out of the box, Rally supports the following operations:
- Bulk indexing
- Force merge
- Searches
- Index stats
- Nodes stats
If you want to use any other operation, you can define a custom runner. Consider, we want to use the percolate API with an older version of Elasticsearch (note that it has been replaced by the percolate query in Elasticsearch 5.0). To achieve this, we c
In track.json specify an operation with type “percolate” (you can choose this name freely):
{
"name": "percolator_with_content_google",
"operation-type": "percolate",
"body": {
"doc": {
"body": "google"
},
"track_scores": true
}
}
Then create a file track.py
next to track.json
and implement the following two functions:
def percolate(es, params):
es.percolate(
index="queries",
doc_type="content",
body=params["body"]
)
def register(registry):
registry.register_runner("percolate", percolate)
The function percolate
is the actual runner and takes the following parameters:
es
, which is the Elasticsearch Python clientparams
which is a dict of parameters provided by its corresponding parameter source. Treat this parameter as read only and do not attempt to write to it.
This function can return either:
- Nothing at all. Then Rally will assume that by default
1
and"ops"
(see below) - A tuple of
weight
and aunit
, which is usually1
and"ops"
. If you run a bulk operation you might return the bulk size here, for example in number of documents or in MB. Then you’d return for example(5000, "docs")
Rally will use these values to store throughput metrics. - A
dict
with arbitrary keys. If thedict
contains the keyweight
it is assumed to be numeric and chosen as weight as defined above. The keyunit
is treated similarly. All other keys are added to themeta
section of the corresponding service time and latency metrics records.
Similar to a parameter source you also need to bind the name of your operation type to the function within register
.
If you need more control, you can also implement a runner class. The example above, implemented as a class looks as follows:
class PercolateRunner:
def __enter__(self):
return self
def __call__(self, es, params):
es.percolate(
index="queries",
doc_type="content",
body=params["body"]
)
def __repr__(self, *args, **kwargs):
return "percolate"
def register(registry):
registry.register_runner("percolate", PercolateRunner())
The actual runner is implemented in the method __call__
and the same return value conventions apply as for functions. For debugging purposes you should also implement __repr__
and provide a human-readable name for your runner. Finally, you need to register your runner in the register
function. Runners also support Python’s context manager interface. Rally uses a new context for each request. Implementing the context manager interface can be handy for cleanup of resources after executing an operation. Rally uses it for example to clear open scrolls.
Note
You need to implement register
just once and register all parameter sources and runners there.
Custom schedulers¶
Warning
Your scheduler is on a performance-critical code-path so please double-check with Rally’s profiling support that you did not introduce any bottlenecks.
If you want to rate-limit execution of tasks, you can specify a target-throughput
(in operations per second). For example, Rally will attempt to run this term query 20 times per second:
{
"operation": "term",
"target-throughput": 20
}
By default, Rally will use a deterministic distribution to determine when to schedule the next operation. This means, that it will execute the term query at 0, 50ms, 100ms, 150ms and so on. Note that the scheduler is aware of the number of clients. Consider this example:
{
"operation": "term",
"target-throughput": 20,
"clients": 4
}
If Rally would not take the number of clients into account and would still issue requests (from each of the four clients) at the same points in time (i.e. 0, 50ms, 100ms, 150ms, ...), it would run at a target throughput of 4 * 20 = 80 operations per second. Hence, Rally will automatically reduce the rate at which each client will execute requests. Each client will issue requests at 0, 200ms, 400ms, 600ms, 800ms, 1000ms and so on. Each client issues five requests per second but as there are four of them, we still have a target throughput of 20 operations per second. You should keep this in mind, when writing your own custom schedules.
If you want to create a custom scheduler, create a file track.py
next to track.json
and implement the following two functions:
import random
def random_schedule(current):
return current + random.randint(10, 900) / 1000.0
def register(registry):
registry.register_scheduler("my_random", random_schedule)
You can then use your custom scheduler as follows:
{
"operation": "term",
"schedule": "my_random"
}
The function random_schedule
returns a floating point number which represents the next point in time when Rally should execute the given operation. This point in time is measured in seconds relative to the beginning of the execution of this task. The parameter current
is the last return value of your function and is 0 for the first invocation. So, for example, this scheduler could return the following series: 0, 0.119, 0.622, 1.29, 1.343, 1.984, 2.233. Note that this implementation is usually not sufficient as it does not take into account the number of clients. Therefore, you will typically want to implement a full-blown scheduler which can also take parameters. Below is an example for our random scheduler:
import random
class RandomScheduler:
def __init__(self, params):
# assume one client by default
clients = self.params.get("clients", 1)
# scale accordingly with the number of clients!
self.lower_bound = clients * self.params.get("lower-bound-millis", 10)
self.upper_bound = clients * self.params.get("upper-bound-millis", 900)
def next(self, current):
return current + random.randint(self.lower_bound, self.upper_bound) / 1000.0
def register(registry):
registry.register_scheduler("my_random", RandomScheduler)
This implementation will now achieve the same rate independent of the number of clients. Additionally, we can pass the lower and upper bound for the random function from our track:
{
"operation": "term",
"schedule": "my_random",
"clients": 4,
"lower-bound-millis": 50,
"upper-bound-millis": 250
}
Running tasks in parallel¶
Rally supports running tasks in parallel with the parallel
element. Below you find a few examples that show how it should be used:
In the simplest case, you let Rally decide the number of clients needed to run the parallel tasks:
{
"parallel": {
"warmup-iterations": 1000,
"iterations": 1000,
"tasks": [
{
"operation": "default",
"target-throughput": 50
},
{
"operation": "term",
"target-throughput": 200
},
{
"operation": "phrase",
"target-throughput": 200
},
{
"operation": "country_agg_uncached",
"target-throughput": 50
}
]
}
}
]
}
Rally will determine that four clients are needed to run each task in a dedicated client.
However, you can also explicitly limit the number of clients:
{
"parallel": {
"clients": 2,
"warmup-iterations": 1000,
"iterations": 1000,
"tasks": [
{
"operation": "default",
"target-throughput": 50
},
{
"operation": "term",
"target-throughput": 200
},
{
"operation": "phrase",
"target-throughput": 200
},
{
"operation": "country_agg_uncached",
"target-throughput": 50
}
]
}
}
This will run the four tasks with just two clients. You could also specify more clients than there are tasks but these will then just idle.
You can also specify a number of clients on sub tasks explicitly (by default, one client is assumed per subtask). This allows to define a weight for each client operation. Note that you need to define the number of clients also on the parallel
parent element, otherwise Rally would determine the number of totally needed clients again on its own:
{
"parallel": {
"clients": 3,
"warmup-iterations": 1000,
"iterations": 1000,
"tasks": [
{
"operation": "default",
"target-throughput": 50
},
{
"operation": "term",
"target-throughput": 200
},
{
"operation": "phrase",
"target-throughput": 200,
"clients": 2
},
{
"operation": "country_agg_uncached",
"target-throughput": 50
}
]
}
}
This will ensure that the phrase query will be executed by two clients. All other ones are executed by one client.
Warning
You cannot nest parallel tasks.
Command Line Reference¶
You can control Rally with subcommands and command line flags:
- Subcommands determine which task Rally performs.
- Command line flags are used to change Rally’s behavior but not all command line flags can be used for each subcommand. To find out which command line flags are supported by a specific subcommand, just run
esrally <<subcommand>> --help
.
Subcommands¶
race
¶
The race
subcommand is used to actually run a benchmark. It is the default one and chosen implicitly if none is given.
list
¶
The list
subcommand is used to list different configuration options:
- telemetry: Will show all telemetry devices that are supported by Rally.
- tracks: Will show all tracks that are supported by Rally. As this may depend on the Elasticsearch version that you want to benchmark, you can specify
--distribution-version
and also--distribution-repository
as additional options. - pipelines: Will show all pipelines that are supported by Rally.
- races: Will show all races that are currently stored. This is needed for the tournament mode.
- cars: Will show all cars that are supported by Rally (i.e. Elasticsearch configurations).
- elasticsearch-plugins: Will show all Elasticsearch plugins and their configurations that are supported by Rally.
To list a specific configuration option, place it after the list
subcommand. For example, esrally list pipelines
will list all pipelines known to Rally.
compare
¶
This subcommand is needed for tournament mode and its usage is described there.
Command Line Flags¶
track-path
¶
Can be either directory that contains a track.json
file or a .json
file with an arbitrary name that contains a track specification. --track-path
and --track-repository
as well as --track
are mutually exclusive. See the track reference to decide whether you should use --track-path
or --track-repository
.
Examples:
# provide a directory - Rally searches for a track.json file in this directory
# Track name is "app-logs"
esrally --track-path=~/Projects/tracks/app-logs
# provide a file name - Rally uses this file directly
# Track name is "syslog"
esrally --track-path=~/Projects/tracks/syslog.json
track-repository
¶
Selects the track repository that Rally should use to resolve tracks. By default the default
track repository is used, which is available in the Github project rally-tracks. See track reference on how to add your own track repositories. --track-path
and --track-repository
as well as --track
are mutually exclusive.
track
¶
Selects the track that Rally should run. By default the geonames
track is run. For more details on how tracks work, see adding tracks or the track reference. --track-path
and --track-repository
as well as --track
are mutually exclusive.
challenge
¶
A track consists of one or more challenges. With this flag you can specify which challenge should be run. If you don’t specify a challenge, Rally derives the default challenge itself. To see the default challenge of a track, run esrally list tracks
.
include-tasks
¶
Each challenge consists of one or more tasks but sometimes you are only interested to run a subset of all tasks. For example, you might have prepared an index already and want only to repeatedly run search benchmarks. Or you want to run only the indexing task but nothing else.
You can use --include-tasks
to specify a comma-separated list of tasks that you want to run. Each item in the list defines either the name of a task or the operation type of a task. Only the tasks that match will be executed. Currently there is also no command that shows a list of tasks per challenge so you need to look at the track source.
Examples:
- Execute only the tasks with the name
index
andterm
:--include-tasks="index,term"
- Execute only tasks of type
search
:--include-tasks="type:search"
- You can also mix and match these:
--include-tasks="index,type:search"
team-repository
¶
Selects the team repository that Rally should use to resolve cars. By default the default
team repository is used, which is available in the Github project rally-teams. See the documentation about cars on how to add your own team repositories.
car
¶
A car defines the Elasticsearch configuration that will be used for the benchmark. To see a list of possible cars, issue esrally list cars
. You can specify one or multiple comma-separated values, for details please refer to the documentation about cars.
Example
esrally --car="4gheap,ea"
Rally will configure Elasticsearch with 4GB of heap (4gheap
) and enable Java assertions (ea
).
elasticsearch-plugins
¶
A comma-separated list of Elasticsearch plugins to install for the benchmark. If a plugin supports multiple configurations you need to specify the configuration after the plugin name. To see a list of possible plugins and configurations, issue esrally list elasticsearch-plugins
.
Example:
esrally --elasticsearch-plugins="analysis-icu,xpack:security"
In this example, Rally will install the analysis-icu
plugin and the x-pack
plugin with the security
configuration. See the reference documentation about Elasticsearch plugins for more details.
pipeline
¶
Selects the pipeline that Rally should run.
Rally can autodetect the pipeline in most cases. If you specify --distribution-version
it will auto-select the pipeline from-distribution
otherwise it will use from-sources-complete
.
laps
¶
Allows to run the benchmark for multiple laps (defaults to 1 lap). Each lap corresponds to one full execution of a track but note that the benchmark candidate is not restarted between laps.
enable-driver-profiling
¶
This option enables a profiler on all operations that the load test driver performs. It is intended to help track authors spot accidental bottlenecks, especially if they implement their own runners or parameter sources. When this mode is enabled, Rally will enable a profiler in the load driver module. After each task and for each client, Rally will add the profile information to a dedicated profile log file. For example:
2017-02-09 08:23:24,35 rally.profile INFO
=== Profile START for client [0] and operation [index-append-1000] ===
16052402 function calls (15794402 primitive calls) in 180.221 seconds
Ordered by: cumulative time
ncalls tottime percall cumtime percall filename:lineno(function)
130 0.001 0.000 168.089 1.293 /Users/dm/Projects/rally/esrally/driver/driver.py:908(time_period_based)
129 0.260 0.002 168.088 1.303 /Users/dm/.rally/benchmarks/tracks/develop/bottleneck/parameter_sources/bulk_source.py:79(params)
129000 0.750 0.000 167.791 0.001 /Users/dm/.rally/benchmarks/tracks/develop/bottleneck/parameter_sources/randomevent.py:142(generate_event)
516000 0.387 0.000 160.485 0.000 /Users/dm/.rally/benchmarks/tracks/develop/bottleneck/parameter_sources/weightedarray.py:20(get_random)
516000 6.199 0.000 160.098 0.000 /Users/dm/.rally/benchmarks/tracks/develop/bottleneck/parameter_sources/weightedarray.py:23(__random_index)
516000 1.292 0.000 152.289 0.000 /usr/local/Cellar/python3/3.6.0/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.6/lib/python3.6/random.py:96(seed)
516000 150.783 0.000 150.783 0.000 {function Random.seed at 0x10b7fa2f0}
129000 0.363 0.000 45.686 0.000 /Users/dm/.rally/benchmarks/tracks/develop/bottleneck/parameter_sources/randomevent.py:48(add_fields)
129000 0.181 0.000 41.742 0.000 /Users/dm/.rally/benchmarks/tracks/develop/bottleneck/parameter_sources/randomevent.py:79(add_fields)
....
=== Profile END for client [0] and operation [index-append-1000] ===
In this example we can spot quickly that Random.seed
is called excessively, causing an accidental bottleneck in the load test driver.
test-mode
¶
Allows you to test a track without running it for the whole duration. This mode is only intended for quick sanity checks when creating a track. Please don’t rely on these numbers at all (they are meaningless).
If you write your own track, please keep in mind that you need prepare your track to support this mode.
telemetry
¶
Activates the provided telemetry devices for this race.
Example
esrally --telemetry=jfr,jit
This activates Java flight recorder and the JIT compiler telemetry devices.
revision
¶
If you actively develop Elasticsearch and want to benchmark a source build of Elasticsearch (which will Rally create for you), you can specify the git revision of Elasticsearch that you want to benchmark. But note that Rally does only support Gradle as build tool which effectively means that it will only support this for Elasticsearch 5.0 or better. The default value is current
.
You can specify the revision in different formats:
--revision=latest
: Use the HEAD revision from origin/master.--revision=current
: Use the current revision (i.e. don’t alter the local source tree).--revision=abc123
: Whereabc123
is some git revision hash.--revision=@2013-07-27T10:37:00Z
: Determines the revision that is closest to the provided date. Rally logs to which git revision hash the date has been resolved and if you use Elasticsearch as metrics store (instead of the default in-memory one), each metric record will contain the git revision hash also in the meta-data section.
Supported date format: If you specify a date, it has to be ISO-8601 conformant and must start with an @
sign to make it easier for Rally to determine that you actually mean a date.
If you want to create source builds of Elasticsearch plugins, you need to specify the revision for Elasticsearch and all relevant plugins separately. Revisions for Elasticsearch and each plugin need to be comma-separated (,
). Each revision is prefixed either by elasticsearch
or by the plugin name and separated by a colon (:
). As core plugins are contained in the Elasticsearch repo, there is no need to specify a revision for them (the revision would even be ignored in fact).
Examples:
- Build latest Elasticsearch and plugin “my-plugin”:
--revision="elasticsearch:latest,my-plugin:latest"
- Build Elasticsearch tag
v5.6.1
and revisionabc123
of plugin “my-plugin”:--revision="elasticsearch:v5.6.1,my-plugin:abc123"
Note that it is still required to provide the parameter --elasticsearch-plugins
. Specifying a plugin with --revision
just tells Rally which revision to use for building the artifact. See the documentation on Elasticsearch plugins for more details.
distribution-version
¶
If you want to benchmark a binary distribution, you can specify the version here.
Example
esrally --distribution-version=2.3.3
Rally will then benchmark the official Elasticsearch 2.3.3 distribution.
Rally works with all releases of Elasticsearch that are supported by Elastic.
The following versions are already end-of-life:
0.x
: Rally is not tested, and not expected to work for this version; we will make no effort to make Rally work.1.x
: Rally works on a best-effort basis with this version but support may be removed at any time.
Additionally, Rally will always work with the current development version of Elasticsearch (by using either a snapshot repository or by building Elasticsearch from sources).
distribution-repository
¶
Rally does not only support benchmarking official distributions but can also benchmark snapshot builds. This is option is really just intended for our benchmarks that are run in continuous integration but if you want to, you can use it too. The only supported value out of the box is release
(default) but you can define an arbitrary repositories in ~/.rally/rally.ini
.
Example
Say, you have an in-house repository where Elasticsearch snapshot builds get published. Then you can add the following in the distributions
section of your Rally config file:
in_house_snapshot.url = https://www.example.org/snapshots/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-{{VERSION}}.tar.gz
in_house_snapshot.cache = false
The url
property defines the URL pattern for this repository. The cache
property defines whether Rally should always download a new archive (cache=false
) or just reuse a previously downloaded version (cache=true
). Rally will replace the {{VERSION}}
placeholder of in the url
property with the value of distribution-version
provided by the user on the command line.
You can use this distribution repository with the name “in_house_snapshot” as follows:
esrally --distribution-repository=in_house_snapshot --distribution-version=6.0.0-SNAPSHOT
This will benchmark the latest 6.0.0 snapshot build of Elasticsearch.
report-format
¶
The command line reporter in Rally displays a table with key metrics after a race. With this option you can specify whether this table should be in markdown
format (default) or csv
.
report-file
¶
By default, the command line reporter will print the results only on standard output, but can also write it to a file.
Example
esrally --report-format=csv --report-file=~/benchmarks/result.csv
client-options
¶
With this option you can customize Rally’s internal Elasticsearch client.
It accepts a list of comma-separated key-value pairs. The key-value pairs have to be delimited by a colon. These options are passed directly to the Elasticsearch Python client API. See their documentation on a list of supported options.
We support the following data types:
- Strings: Have to be enclosed in single quotes. Example:
ca_certs:'/path/to/CA_certs'
- Numbers: There is nothing special about numbers. Example:
sniffer_timeout:60
- Booleans: Specify either
true
orfalse
. Example:use_ssl:true
In addition to the options, supported by the Elasticsearch client, it is also possible to enable HTTP compression by specifying compressed:true
Default value: timeout:60000,request_timeout:60000
Warning
If you provide your own client options, the default value will not be magically merged. You have to specify all client options explicitly. The only exceptions to this rule is ca_cert
(see below).
Examples
Here are a few common examples:
- Enable HTTP compression:
--client-options="compressed:true"
- Enable SSL (e.g. if you have X-Pack Security installed):
--client-options="use_ssl:true,verify_certs:true"
. Note that you don’t need to setca_cert
(which defines the path to the root certificates). Rally does this automatically for you. - Enable SSL with a client key and certificate:
--client-options="use_ssl:true,verify_certs:true,ca_certs:'/path/to/cacert.pem',client_cert:'/path/to/client_cert.pem',client_key='/path/to/client_key.pem"
(see also the [Elasticsearch Python client docs](http://elasticsearch-py.readthedocs.io/en/master/index.html#ssl-and-authentication)) - Enable basic authentication:
--client-options="basic_auth_user:'user',basic_auth_password:'password'"
. Please avoid the characters'
,,
and:
in user name and password as Rally’s parsing of these options is currently really simple and there is no possibility to escape characters.
on-error
¶
THis option controls whether Rally will continue
or abort
when a request error occurs. By default, Rally will record the error and report the error rate at the end of a race. With --on-error=abort
, Rally will immediately abort the race on the first error and print a detailed error message.
load-driver-hosts
¶
By default, Rally will run its load driver on the same machine where you start the benchmark. However, if you benchmark larger clusters one machine may not be enough to generate sufficient load. Hence, you can specify a comma-separated list of hosts which should be used to generate load with --load-driver-hosts
.
Example
esrally --load-driver-hosts=10.17.20.5,10.17.20.6
In the example, above Rally will generate load from the hosts 10.17.20.5
and 10.17.20.6
. For this to work, you need to start a Rally daemon on these machines, see distributing the load test driver for a complete example.
target-hosts
¶
If you run the benchmark-only
pipeline or you want Rally to benchmark a remote cluster, then you can specify a comma-delimited list of hosts:port pairs to which Rally should connect. The default value is 127.0.0.1:9200
.
Example
esrally --pipeline=benchmark-only --target-hosts=10.17.0.5:9200,10.17.0.6:9200
This will run the benchmark against the hosts 10.17.0.5 and 10.17.0.6 on port 9200. See client-options
if you use X-Pack Security and need to authenticate or Rally should use https.
quiet
¶
Suppresses some output on the command line.
offline
¶
Tells Rally that it should assume it has no connection to the Internet when checking for track data. The default value is false
. Note that Rally will only assume this for tracks but not for anything else, e.g. it will still try to download Elasticsearch distributions that are not locally cached or fetch the Elasticsearch source tree.
preserve-install
¶
Rally usually installs and launches an Elasticsearch cluster internally and wipes the entire directory after the benchmark is done. Sometimes you want to keep this cluster including all data after the benchmark has finished and that’s what you can do with this flag. Note that depending on the track that has been run, the cluster can eat up a very significant amount of disk space (at least dozens of GB). The default value is configurable in the advanced configuration but usually false
.
Note
This option does only affect clusters that are provisioned by Rally. More specifically, if you use the pipeline benchmark-only
, this option is ineffective as Rally does not provision a cluster in this case.
cluster-health
¶
Rally checks whether the cluster health is “green” before it runs a benchmark against it. The main reason is that we don’t want to benchmark a cluster which is shuffling shards around or might start doing so. If you really need to run a benchmark against a cluster that is “yellow” or “red”, then you can explicitly override Rally’s default behavior. It is even possible to skip this check entirely by providing --cluster-health=skip
. But please think twice before doing so and rather eliminate the root cause.
Example
esrally --cluster-health=yellow
advanced-config
¶
This flag determines whether Rally should present additional (advanced) configuration options. The default value is false
.
Example
esrally configure --advanced-config
assume-defaults
¶
This flag determines whether Rally should automatically accept all values for configuration options that provide a default. This is mainly intended to configure Rally automatically in CI runs. The default value is false
.
Example
esrally configure --assume-defaults=true
user-tag
¶
This is only relevant when you want to run tournaments. You can use this flag to attach an arbitrary text to the meta-data of each metric record and also the corresponding race. This will help you to recognize a race when you run esrally list races
as you don’t need to remember the concrete timestamp on which a race has been run but can instead use your own descriptive names.
The required format is key
”:” value
. You can choose key
and value
freely. Note that only one user tag is supported.
Example
esrally --user-tag="intention:github-issue-1234-baseline"
You can also specify multiple tags. They need to be separated by a comma.
Example
esrally --user-tag="disk:SSD,data_node_count:4"
When you run esrally list races
, this will show up again:
dm@io:~ $ esrally list races
____ ____
/ __ \____ _/ / /_ __
/ /_/ / __ `/ / / / / /
/ _, _/ /_/ / / / /_/ /
/_/ |_|\__,_/_/_/\__, /
/____/
Recent races:
Race Timestamp Track Challenge Car User Tag
---------------- ------- ------------------- -------- ------------------------------------
20160518T122341Z pmc append-no-conflicts defaults intention:github-issue-1234-baseline
20160518T112341Z pmc append-no-conflicts defaults disk:SSD,data_node_count:4
This will help you recognize a specific race when running esrally compare
.
Offline Usage¶
In some corporate environments servers do not have Internet access. You can still use Rally in such environments and this page summarizes all information that you need to get started.
Installation and Configuration¶
We provide a special offline installation package. Please refer to the offline installation guide for detailed instructions. After the installation you can just follow the normal configuration procedure.
Command Line Usage¶
Rally will automatically detect upon startup that no Internet connection is available and print the following warning:
[WARNING] No Internet connection detected. Automatic download of track data sets etc. is disabled.
It detects this by trying to connect to github.com
. If you want to disable this probing you can explicitly specify --offline
.
Using tracks¶
A Rally track describes a benchmarking scenario. You can either write your own tracks or use the tracks that Rally provides out of the box. In the former case, Rally will work just fine in an offline environment. In the latter case, Rally would normally download the track and its associated data from the Internet. If you want to use one of Rally’s standard tracks in offline mode, you need to download all relevant files first on a machine that has Internet access and copy it to the target machine(s).
Use the download script to download all data for a track on a machine that has access to the Internet. Example:
# downloads the script from Github
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/rally-tracks/master/download.sh
chmod u+x download.sh
# download all data for the geonames track
./download.sh geonames
This will download all data for the geonames track and create a tar file rally-track-data-geonames.tar
in the current directory. Copy this file to the home directory of the user which will execute Rally on the target machine (e.g. /home/rally-user
).
On the target machine, run:
cd ~
tar -xf rally-track-data-geonames.tar
The download script does not require a Rally installation on the machine with Internet access but assumes that git
and curl
are available.
After you’ve copied the data, you can list the available tracks with esrally list tracks
. If a track shows up in this list, it just means that the track description is available locally but not necessarily all data files.
Using cars¶
Note
You can skip this section if you use Rally only as a load generator.
If you have Rally configure and start Elasticsearch then you also need the out-of-the-box configurations available. Run the following command on a machine with Internet access:
git clone https://github.com/elastic/rally-teams.git ~/.rally/benchmarks/teams/default
tar -C ~ -czf rally-teams.tar.gz .rally/benchmarks/teams/default
Copy that file to the target machine(s) and run on the target machine:
cd ~
tar -xzf rally-teams.tar.gz
After you’ve copied the data, you can list the available tracks with esrally list cars
.
Track Reference¶
Definition¶
A track is the description of one ore more benchmarking scenarios with a specific document corpus. It defines for example the involved indices, data files and which operations are invoked. Its most important attributes are:
- One or more indices, each with one or more types
- The queries to issue
- Source URL of the benchmark data
- A list of steps to run, which we’ll call “challenge”, for example indexing data with a specific number of documents per bulk request or running searches for a defined number of iterations.
Track File Format and Storage¶
A track is specified in a JSON file.
Ad-hoc use¶
For ad-hoc use you can store a track definition anywhere on the file system and reference it with --track-path
, e.g:
# provide a directory - Rally searches for a track.json file in this directory
# Track name is "app-logs"
esrally --track-path=~/Projects/tracks/app-logs
# provide a file name - Rally uses this file directly
# Track name is "syslog"
esrally --track-path=~/Projects/tracks/syslog.json
Rally will also search for additional files like mappings or data files in the provided directory. If you use advanced features like custom runners or parameter sources we recommend that you create a separate directory per track.
Custom Track Repositories¶
Alternatively, you can store Rally tracks also in a dedicated git repository which we call a “track repository”. Rally provides a default track repository that is hosted on Github. You can also add your own track repositories although this requires a bit of additional work. First of all, track repositories need to be managed by git. The reason is that Rally can benchmark multiple versions of Elasticsearch and we use git branches in the track repository to determine the best match for each track (based on the command line parameter --distribution-version
). The versioning scheme is as follows:
- The master branch needs to work with the latest master branch of Elasticsearch.
- All other branches need to match the version scheme of Elasticsearch, i.e.
MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH-SUFFIX
where all parts exceptMAJOR
are optional.
Rally implements a fallback logic so you don’t need to define a branch for each patch release of Elasticsearch. For example:
- The branch 6.0.0-alpha1 will be chosen for the version
6.0.0-alpha1
of Elasticsearch. - The branch 5 will be chosen for all versions for Elasticsearch with the major version 5, e.g.
5.0.0
,5.1.3
(provided there is no specific branch).
Rally tries to use the branch with the best match to the benchmarked version of Elasticsearch.
Rally will also search for related files like mappings or custom runners or parameter sources in the track repository. However, Rally will use a separate directory to look for data files (~/.rally/benchmarks/data/$TRACK_NAME/
). The reason is simply that we do not want to check multi-GB data files into git.
Creating a new track repository¶
All track repositories are located in ~/.rally/benchmarks/tracks
. If you want to add a dedicated track repository, called private
follow these steps:
cd ~/.rally/benchmarks/tracks
mkdir private
cd private
git init
# add your track now
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
If you want to share your tracks with others you need to add a remote and push it:
git remote add origin git@git-repos.acme.com:acme/rally-tracks.git
git push -u origin master
If you have added a remote you should also add it in ~/.rally/rally.ini
, otherwise you can skip this step. Open the file in your editor of choice and add the following line in the section tracks
:
private.url = <<URL_TO_YOUR_ORIGIN>>
Rally will then automatically update the local tracking branches before the benchmark starts.
You can now verify that everything works by listing all tracks in this track repository:
esrally list tracks --track-repository=private
This shows all tracks that are available on the master
branch of this repository. Suppose you only created tracks on the branch 2
because you’re interested in the performance of Elasticsearch 2.x, then you can specify also the distribution version:
esrally list tracks --track-repository=private --distribution-version=2.0.0
Rally will follow the same branch fallback logic as described above.
Adding an already existing track repository¶
If you want to add a track repository that already exists, just open ~/.rally/rally.ini
in your editor of choice and add the following line in the section tracks
:
your_repo_name.url = <<URL_TO_YOUR_ORIGIN>>
After you have added this line, have Rally list the tracks in this repository:
esrally list tracks --track-repository=your_repo_name
When to use what?¶
We recommend the following path:
- Start with a simple json file. The file name can be arbitrary.
- If you need custom runners or parameter sources, create one directory per track. Then you can keep everything separated. Remember that the JSON file needs to be named
track.json
. - If you want to version your tracks so they can work with multiple versions of Elasticsearch (e.g. you are running benchmarks before an upgrade), use a track repository.
Anatomy of a track¶
A track JSON file consists of the following sections:
- indices
- operations
- challenges
In the indices
section you describe the relevant indices. Rally can auto-manage them for you: it can download the associated data files, create and destroy the index and apply the relevant mappings. Sometimes, you may want to have full control over the index. Then you can specify "auto-managed": false
on an index. Rally will then assume the index is already present. However, there are some disadvantages with this approach. First of all, this can only work if you set up the cluster by yourself and use the pipeline benchmark-only
. Second, the index is out of control of Rally, which means that you need to keep track for yourself of the index configuration. Third, it does not play nice with the laps
feature (which you can use to run multiple iterations). Usually, Rally will destroy and recreate all specified indices for each lap but if you use "auto-managed": false
, it cannot do that. As a consequence it will produce bogus metrics if your track specifies that Rally should run bulk-index operations (as you’ll just overwrite existing documents from lap 2 on). So please use extra care if you don’t let Rally manage the track’s indices.
In the operations
section you describe which operations are available for this track and how they are parametrized.
In the challenges
section you describe one or more execution schedules for the operations defined in the operations
block. Think of it as different scenarios that you want to test for your data set. An example challenge is to index with 2 clients at maximum throughput while searching with another two clients with 10 operations per second.
Track elements¶
The track elements that are described here are defined in Rally’s JSON schema for tracks. Rally uses this track schema to validate your tracks when it is loading them.
Each track defines the following info attributes:
version
(optional): An integer describing the track specification version in use. Rally uses it to detect incompatible future track specification versions and raise an error. See the table below for a reference of valid versions.description
(mandatory): A human-readable description of the track.short-description
(mandatory): A shorter description of the track.data-url
(optional): A http or https URL that points to the root path where Rally can obtain the corresponding data for this track. This element is not needed if data are only generated on the fly by a custom runner.
Track Specification Version | Rally version |
---|---|
1 | >=0.7.3 |
The version
property has been introduced with Rally 0.7.3. Rally versions before 0.7.3 do not recognize this property and thus cannot detect incompatible track specification versions.
Example:
{
"version": 1,
"short-description": "Standard benchmark in Rally (8.6M POIs from Geonames)",
"description": "This test indexes 8.6M documents (POIs from Geonames, total 2.8 GB json) using 8 client threads and 5000 docs per bulk request against Elasticsearch",
"data-url": "http://benchmarks.elasticsearch.org.s3.amazonaws.com/corpora/geonames"
}
meta¶
For each track, an optional structure, called meta
can be defined. You are free which properties this element should contain.
This element can also be defined on the following elements:
challenge
operation
task
If the meta
structure contains the same key on different elements, more specific ones will override the same key of more generic elements. The order from generic to most specific is:
- track
- challenge
- operation
- task
E.g. a key defined on a task, will override the same key defined on a challenge. All properties defined within the merged meta
structure, will get copied into each metrics record.
indices¶
The indices
section contains a list of all indices that are used by this track. By default Rally will assume that it can destroy and create these indices at will.
Each index in this list consists of the following properties:
name
(mandatory): The name of the index.auto-managed
(optional, defaults totrue
): Controls whether Rally or the user takes care of creating / destroying the index. If this setting isfalse
, Rally will neither create nor delete this index but just assume its presence.- types (optional): A list of types in this index.
Each type consists of the following properties:
name
(mandatory): Name of the type.mapping
(mandatory): File name of the corresponding mapping file.documents
(optional): File name of the corresponding documents that should be indexed. For local use, this file can be a.json
file. If you provide adata-url
we recommend that you provide a compressed file here. The following extensions are supported:.zip
,.bz2
,.gz
,.tar
,.tar.gz
,.tgz
or.tar.bz2
. It must contain exactly one JSON file with the same name. The preferred file extension for our official tracks is.bz2
.includes-action-and-meta-data
(optional, defaults tofalse
): Defines whether the documents file contains already an action and meta-data line (true
) or only documents (false
).document-count
(mandatory ifdocuments
is set): Number of documents in the documents file. This number is used by Rally to determine which client indexes which part of the document corpus (each of the N clients gets one N-th of the document corpus). If you are using parent-child, specify the number of parent documents.compressed-bytes
(optional but recommended ifdocuments
is set): The size in bytes of the compressed document file. This number is used to show users how much data will be downloaded by Rally and also to check whether the download is complete.uncompressed-bytes
(optional but recommended ifdocuments
is set): The size in bytes of the documents file after decompression. This number is used by Rally to show users how much disk space the decompressed file will need and to check that the whole file could be decompressed successfully.
Example:
"indices": [
{
"name": "geonames",
"types": [
{
"name": "type",
"mapping": "mappings.json",
"documents": "documents.json.bz2",
"document-count": 8647880,
"compressed-bytes": 197857614,
"uncompressed-bytes": 2790927196
}
]
}
]
templates¶
The indices
section contains a list of all index templates that Rally should create.
name
(mandatory): Index template nameindex-pattern
(mandatory): Index pattern that matches the index template. This must match the definition in the index template file.delete-matching-indices
(optional, defaults totrue
): Delete all indices that match the provided index pattern before start of the benchmark.template
(mandatory): Index template file name
Example:
"templates": [
{
"name": "my-default-index-template",
"index-pattern": "my-index-*",
"delete-matching-indices": true,
"template": "default-template.json"
}
]
operations¶
The operations
section contains a list of all operations that are available later when specifying challenges. Operations define the static properties of a request against Elasticsearch whereas the schedule
element defines the dynamic properties (such as the target throughput).
Each operation consists of the following properties:
name
(mandatory): The name of this operation. You can choose this name freely. It is only needed to reference the operation when defining schedules.operation-type
(mandatory): Type of this operation. Out of the box, Rally supports the following operation types:index
,force-merge
,index-stats
,node-stats
andsearch
. You can run arbitrary operations however by defining custom runners.
Depending on the operation type a couple of further parameters can be specified.
index¶
With the operation type index
you can execute bulk requests. It supports the following properties:
index
(optional): An index name that defines which indices should be targeted by this indexing operation. Only needed if theindex
section contains more than one index and you don’t want to index all of them with this operation.bulk-size
(mandatory): Defines the bulk size in number of documents.batch-size
(optional): Defines how many documents Rally will read at once. This is an expert setting and only meant to avoid accidental bottlenecks for very small bulk sizes (e.g. if you want to benchmark with a bulk-size of 1, you should set batch-size higher).pipeline
(optional): Defines the name of an (existing) ingest pipeline that should be used (only supported from Elasticsearch 5.0).conflicts
(optional): Type of index conflicts to simulate. If not specified, no conflicts will be simulated. Valid values are: ‘sequential’ (A document id is replaced with a document id with a sequentially increasing id), ‘random’ (A document id is replaced with a document id with a random other id).
Example:
{
"name": "index-append",
"operation-type": "index",
"bulk-size": 5000
}
Throughput will be reported as number of indexed documents per second.
force-merge¶
With the operation type force-merge
you can call the force merge API. On older versions of Elasticsearch (prior to 2.1), Rally will use the optimize API
instead. It supports the following parameter:
max_num_segments
(optional) The number of segments the index should be merged into. Defaults to simply checking if a merge needs to execute, and if so, executes it.
Throughput metrics are not necessarily very useful but will be reported in the number of completed force-merge operations per second.
index-stats¶
With the operation type index-stats
you can call the indices stats API. It does not support any parameters.
Throughput will be reported as number of completed index-stats operations per second.
node-stats¶
With the operation type nodes-stats
you can execute nodes stats API. It does not support any parameters.
Throughput will be reported as number of completed node-stats operations per second.
search¶
With the operation type search
you can execute request body searches. It supports the following properties:
index
(optional): An index pattern that defines which indices should be targeted by this query. Only needed if theindex
section contains more than one index. Otherwise, Rally will automatically derive the index to use. If you have defined multiple indices and want to query all of them, just specify"index": "_all"
.type
(optional): Defines the type within the specified index for this query.cache
(optional): Whether to use the query request cache. By default, Rally will define no value thus the default depends on the benchmark candidate settings and Elasticsearch version.request-params
(optional): A structure containing arbitrary request parameters. The supported parameters names are documented in the Python ES client API docs. Parameters that are implicitly set by Rally (e.g. body or request_cache) are not supported (i.e. you should not try to set them and if so expect unspecified behavior).body
(mandatory): The query body.pages
(optional): Number of pages to retrieve. If this parameter is present, a scroll query will be executed. If you want to retrieve all result pages, use the value “all”.results-per-page
(optional): Number of documents to retrieve per page for scroll queries.
Example:
{
"name": "default",
"operation-type": "search",
"body": {
"query": {
"match_all": {}
}
},
"request-params": {
"_source_include": "some_field",
"analyze_wildcard": false
}
}
For scroll queries, throughput will be reported as number of retrieved scroll pages per second. The unit is ops/s, where one op(eration) is one page that has been retrieved. The rationale is that each HTTP request corresponds to one operation and we need to issue one HTTP request per result page. Note that if you use a dedicated Elasticsearch metrics store, you can also use other request-level meta-data such as the number of hits for your own analyses.
For other queries, throughput will be reported as number of search requests per second, also measured as ops/s.
challenges¶
The challenges
section contains a list of challenges which describe the benchmark scenarios for this data set. It can reference all operations that are defined in the operations
section.
Each challenge consists of the following properties:
name
(mandatory): A descriptive name of the challenge. Should not contain spaces in order to simplify handling on the command line for users.description
(mandatory): A human readable description of the challenge.default
(optional): If true, Rally selects this challenge by default if the user did not specify a challenge on the command line. If your track only defines one challenge, it is implicitly selected as default, otherwise you need define"default": true
on exactly one challenge.index-settings
(optional): Defines the index settings of the benchmark candidate when an index is created. Note that these settings are only applied if the index is auto-managed.schedule
(mandatory): Defines the concrete execution order of operations. It is described in more detail below.
Note
You should strive to minimize the number of challenges. If you just want to run a subset of the tasks in a challenge, use task filtering.
schedule¶
The schedule
element contains a list of tasks that are executed by Rally. Each task consists of the following properties:
clients
(optional, defaults to 1): The number of clients that should execute a task concurrently.warmup-iterations
(optional, defaults to 0): Number of iterations that Rally should execute to warmup the benchmark candidate. Warmup iterations will not show up in the measurement results.iterations
(optional, defaults to 1): Number of measurement iterations that Rally executes. The command line report will automatically adjust the percentile numbers based on this number (i.e. if you just run 5 iterations you will not get a 99.9th percentile because we need at least 1000 iterations to determine this value precisely).warmup-time-period
(optional, defaults to 0): A time period in seconds that Rally considers for warmup of the benchmark candidate. All response data captured during warmup will not show up in the measurement results.time-period
(optional): A time period in seconds that Rally considers for measurement. Note that for bulk indexing you should usually not define this time period. Rally will just bulk index all documents and consider every sample after the warmup time period as measurement sample.schedule
(optional, defaults todeterministic
): Defines the schedule for this task, i.e. it defines at which point in time during the benchmark an operation should be executed. For example, if you specify adeterministic
schedule and a target-interval of 5 (seconds), Rally will attempt to execute the corresponding operation at second 0, 5, 10, 15 ... . Out of the box, Rally supportsdeterministic
andpoisson
but you can define your own custom schedules.target-throughput
(optional): Defines the benchmark mode. If it is not defined, Rally assumes this is a throughput benchmark and will run the task as fast as it can. This is mostly needed for batch-style operations where it is more important to achieve the best throughput instead of an acceptable latency. If it is defined, it specifies the number of requests per second over all clients. E.g. if you specifytarget-throughput: 1000
with 8 clients, it means that each client will issue 125 (= 1000 / 8) requests per second. In total, all clients will issue 1000 requests each second. If Rally reports less than the specified throughput then Elasticsearch simply cannot reach it.target-interval
(optional): This is just1 / target-throughput
(in seconds) and may be more convenient for cases where the throughput is less than one operation per second. Define eithertarget-throughput
ortarget-interval
but not both (otherwise Rally will raise an error).
Choosing a schedule¶
Rally allows you to choose between the following schedules to simulate traffic:
The diagram below shows how different schedules in Rally behave during the first ten seconds of a benchmark. Each schedule is configured for a (mean) target throughput of one operation per second.
If you want as much reproducibility as possible you can choose the deterministic schedule. A Poisson distribution models random independent arrivals of clients which on average match the expected arrival rate which makes it suitable for modelling the behaviour of multiple clients that decide independently when to issue a request. For this reason, Poisson processes play an important role in queueing theory.
If you have more complex needs on how to model traffic, you can also implement a custom schedule.
Time-based vs. iteration-based¶
You should usually use time periods for batch style operations and iterations for the rest. However, you can also choose to run a query for a certain time period.
All tasks in the schedule
list are executed sequentially in the order in which they have been defined. However, it is also possible to execute multiple tasks concurrently, by wrapping them in a parallel
element. The parallel
element defines of the following properties:
clients
(optional): The number of clients that should execute the provided tasks. If you specify this property, Rally will only use as many clients as you have defined on theparallel
element (see examples)!warmup-time-period
(optional, defaults to 0): Allows to define a default value for all tasks of theparallel
element.time-period
(optional, no default value if not specified): Allows to define a default value for all tasks of theparallel
element.warmup-iterations
(optional, defaults to 0): Allows to define a default value for all tasks of theparallel
element.iterations
(optional, defaults to 1): Allows to define a default value for all tasks of theparallel
element.completed-by
(optional): Allows to define the name of one task in thetasks
list. As soon as this task has completed, the wholeparallel
task structure is considered completed. If this property is not explicitly defined, theparallel
task structure is considered completed as soon as all its subtasks have completed. A task is completed if and only if all associated clients have completed execution.tasks
(mandatory): Defines a list of tasks that should be executed concurrently. Each task in the list can define the following properties that have been defined above:clients
,warmup-time-period
,time-period
,warmup-iterations
anditerations
.
Note
parallel
elements cannot be nested.
Warning
Specify the number of clients on each task separately. If you specify this number on the parallel
element instead, Rally will only use that many clients in total and you will only want to use this behavior in very rare cases (see examples)!
Examples¶
Note that we do not show the operation definition in the examples below but you should be able to infer from the operation name what it is doing.
In this example Rally will run a bulk index operation unthrottled for one hour:
"schedule": [
{
"operation": "bulk",
"warmup-time-period": 120,
"time-period": 3600,
"clients": 8
}
]
If we want to run a few queries concurrently, we can use the parallel
element (note how we can define default values on the parallel
element):
"schedule": [
{
"parallel": {
"warmup-iterations": 50,
"iterations": 100,
"tasks": [
{
"operation": "match-all",
"clients": 4,
"target-throughput": 50
},
{
"operation": "term",
"clients": 2,
"target-throughput": 200
},
{
"operation": "phrase",
"clients": 2,
"target-throughput": 200
}
]
}
}
]
This schedule will run a match all query, a term query and a phrase query concurrently. It will run with eight clients in total (four for the match all query and two each for the term and phrase query). You can also see that each task can have different settings.
In this scenario, we run indexing and a few queries concurrently with a total of 14 clients:
"schedule": [
{
"parallel": {
"tasks": [
{
"operation": "bulk",
"warmup-time-period": 120,
"time-period": 3600,
"clients": 8,
"target-throughput": 50
},
{
"operation": "default",
"clients": 2,
"warmup-iterations": 50,
"iterations": 100,
"target-throughput": 50
},
{
"operation": "term",
"clients": 2,
"warmup-iterations": 50,
"iterations": 100,
"target-throughput": 200
},
{
"operation": "phrase",
"clients": 2,
"warmup-iterations": 50,
"iterations": 100,
"target-throughput": 200
}
]
}
}
]
We can use completed-by
to stop querying as soon as bulk-indexing has completed:
"schedule": [
{
"parallel": {
"completed-by": "bulk",
"tasks": [
{
"operation": "bulk",
"warmup-time-period": 120,
"time-period": 3600,
"clients": 8,
"target-throughput": 50
},
{
"operation": "default",
"clients": 2,
"warmup-time-period": 480,
"time-period": 7200,
"target-throughput": 50
}
]
}
}
]
We can also mix sequential tasks with the parallel
element. In this scenario we are indexing with 8 clients and continue querying with 6 clients after indexing has finished:
"schedule": [
{
"operation": "bulk",
"warmup-time-period": 120,
"time-period": 3600,
"clients": 8,
"target-throughput": 50
},
{
"parallel": {
"warmup-iterations": 50,
"iterations": 100,
"tasks": [
{
"operation": "default",
"clients": 2,
"target-throughput": 50
},
{
"operation": "term",
"clients": 2,
"target-throughput": 200
},
{
"operation": "phrase",
"clients": 2,
"target-throughput": 200
}
]
}
}
]
Be aware of the following case where we explicitly define that we want to run only with two clients in total:
"schedule": [
{
"parallel": {
"warmup-iterations": 50,
"iterations": 100,
"clients": 2,
"tasks": [
{
"operation": "match-all",
"target-throughput": 50
},
{
"operation": "term",
"target-throughput": 200
},
{
"operation": "phrase",
"target-throughput": 200
}
]
}
}
]
Rally will not run all three tasks concurrently because you specified that you want only two clients in total. Hence, Rally will first run “match-all” and “term” concurrently (with one client each). After they have finished, Rally will run “phrase” with one client.
Cars¶
A rally “car” is a specific configuration of Elasticsearch. You can list the available cars with esrally list cars
:
____ ____
/ __ \____ _/ / /_ __
/ /_/ / __ `/ / / / / /
/ _, _/ /_/ / / / /_/ /
/_/ |_|\__,_/_/_/\__, /
/____/
Name Type Description
---------- ------ ----------------------------------
16gheap car Sets the Java heap to 16GB
1gheap car Sets the Java heap to 1GB
2gheap car Sets the Java heap to 2GB
4gheap car Sets the Java heap to 4GB
8gheap car Sets the Java heap to 8GB
defaults car Sets the Java heap to 1GB
verbose_iw car Log more detailed merge time stats
ea mixin Enables Java assertions
You can specify the car that Rally should use with e.g. --car="4gheap"
. It is also possible to specify one or more “mixins” to further customize the configuration. For example, you can specify --car="4gheap,ea"
to run with a 4GB heap and enable Java assertions (they are disabled by default).
Similar to custom tracks, you can also define your own cars.
The Anatomy of a car¶
The default car definitions of Rally are stored in ~/.rally/benchmarks/teams/default/cars
. There we find the following structure:
├── 16gheap.ini
├── 1gheap.ini
├── 2gheap.ini
├── 4gheap.ini
├── defaults.ini
├── ea
│ └── config
│ └── jvm.options
├── ea.ini
├── vanilla
│ └── config
│ ├── elasticsearch.yml
│ ├── jvm.options
│ └── log4j2.properties
├── verbose_iw
│ └── config
│ ├── elasticsearch.yml
│ ├── jvm.options
│ └── log4j2.properties
└── verbose_iw.ini
Each .ini
file in the top level directory defines a car. And each directory (ea
, vanilla
or verbose_iw
) contains templates for the config files.
Let’s have a look at the 1gheap
car by inspecting 1gheap.ini
:
[meta]
description=Sets the Java heap to 1GB
type=car
[config]
base=vanilla
[variables]
heap_size=1g
The name of the car is derived from the ini file name. In the meta
section we can provide a description
and the type
. Use car
if a configuration can be used standalone and mixin
if it needs to be combined with other configurations. In the config
section we define that this definition is based on the vanilla
configuration. We also define a variable heap_size
and set it to 1g
.
Let’s open vanilla/config/jvm.options
to see how this variable is used (we’ll only show the relevant part here):
# Xms represents the initial size of total heap space
# Xmx represents the maximum size of total heap space
-Xms{{heap_size}}
-Xmx{{heap_size}}
So Rally reads all variables and the template files and replaces the variables in the final configuration. Note that Rally does not know anything about jvm.options
or elasticsearch.yml
. For Rally, these are just plain text templates that need to be copied to the Elasticsearch directory before running a benchmark. Under the hood, Rally uses Jinja2 as template language. This allows you to use Jinja2 expressions in your carr configuration files.
If you open vanilla/config/elasticsearch.yml
you will see a few variables that are not defined in the .ini
file:
network_host
http_port
node_count_per_host
These values are derived by Rally internally based on command line flags and you cannot override them in your car definition. You also cannot use these names as names for variables because Rally would simply override them.
If you specify multiple configurations, e.g. --car="4gheap,ea"
, Rally will apply them in order. It will first read all variables in 4gheap.ini
, then in ea.ini
. Afterwards, it will copy all configuration files from the corresponding config base of 4gheap
and append all configuration files from ea
. This also shows when to define a separate “car” and when to define a “mixin”: If you need to amend configuration files, use a mixin, if you need to have a specific configuration, define a car.
Custom Team Repositories¶
Rally provides a default team repository that is hosted on Github. You can also add your own team repositories although this requires a bit of additional work. First of all, team repositories need to be managed by git. The reason is that Rally can benchmark multiple versions of Elasticsearch and we use git branches in the track repository to determine the best match. The versioning scheme is as follows:
- The master branch needs to work with the latest master branch of Elasticsearch.
- All other branches need to match the version scheme of Elasticsearch, i.e.
MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH-SUFFIX
where all parts exceptMAJOR
are optional.
Rally implements a fallback logic so you don’t need to define a branch for each patch release of Elasticsearch. For example:
- The branch 6.0.0-alpha1 will be chosen for the version
6.0.0-alpha1
of Elasticsearch. - The branch 5 will be chosen for all versions for Elasticsearch with the major version 5, e.g.
5.0.0
,5.1.3
(provided there is no specific branch).
Rally tries to use the branch with the best match to the benchmarked version of Elasticsearch.
Creating a new team repository¶
All team repositories are located in ~/.rally/benchmarks/teams
. If you want to add a dedicated team repository, called private
follow these steps:
cd ~/.rally/benchmarks/teams
mkdir private
cd private
git init
# add your team now (don't forget to add the subdirectory "cars").
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
If you want to share your teams with others (or you want to run remote benchmarks) you need to add a remote and push it:
git remote add origin git@git-repos.acme.com:acme/rally-teams.git
git push -u origin master
If you have added a remote you should also add it in ~/.rally/rally.ini
, otherwise you can skip this step. Open the file in your editor of choice and add the following line in the section teams
:
private.url = <<URL_TO_YOUR_ORIGIN>>
Rally will then automatically update the local tracking branches before the benchmark starts.
Warning
If you run benchmarks against a remote machine that is under the control of Rally then you need to add the custom team configuration on every node!
You can now verify that everything works by listing all teams in this team repository:
esrally list cars --team-repository=private
This shows all teams that are available on the master
branch of this repository. Suppose you only created tracks on the branch 2
because you’re interested in the performance of Elasticsearch 2.x, then you can specify also the distribution version:
esrally list teams --team-repository=private --distribution-version=2.0.0
Rally will follow the same branch fallback logic as described above.
Adding an already existing team repository¶
If you want to add a team repository that already exists, just open ~/.rally/rally.ini
in your editor of choice and add the following line in the section teams
:
your_repo_name.url = <<URL_TO_YOUR_ORIGIN>>
After you have added this line, have Rally list the tracks in this repository:
esrally list cars --team-repository=your_repo_name
Using Elasticsearch Plugins¶
You can have Rally setup an Elasticsearch cluster with plugins for you. However, there are a couple of restrictions:
- This feature is only supported from Elasticsearch 5.0.0 onwards
- Whereas Rally caches downloaded Elasticsearch distributions, plugins will always be installed via the Internet and thus each machine where an Elasticsearch node will be installed, requires an active Internet connection.
Listing plugins¶
To see which plugins are available, run esrally list elasticsearch-plugins
:
Available Elasticsearch plugins:
Name Configuration
----------------------- ----------------
analysis-icu
analysis-kuromoji
analysis-phonetic
analysis-smartcn
analysis-stempel
analysis-ukrainian
discovery-azure-classic
discovery-ec2
discovery-file
discovery-gce
ingest-attachment
ingest-geoip
ingest-user-agent
lang-javascript
lang-python
mapper-attachments
mapper-murmur3
mapper-size
repository-azure
repository-gcs
repository-hdfs
repository-s3
store-smb
x-pack monitoring-local
x-pack security
Rally supports plugins only for Elasticsearch 5.0 or better. As the availability of plugins may change from release to release we recommend that you include the --distribution-version
parameter when listing plugins. By default Rally assumes that you want to benchmark the latest master version of Elasticsearch.
Let’s see what happens if we run esrally list elasticsearch-plugins --distribution-version=2.4.0
:
No Elasticsearch plugins are available.
As mentioned before, this is expected as only Elasticsearch 5.0 or better is supported.
Running a benchmark with plugins¶
In order to tell Rally to install a plugin, use the --elasticsearch-plugins
parameter when starting a race. You can provide multiple plugins (comma-separated) and they will be installed in the order to that you define on the command line.
Example:
esrally --distribution-version=5.5.0 --elasticsearch-plugins="analysis-icu,analysis-phonetic"
This will install the plugins analysis-icu
and analysis-phonetic
(in that order). In order to use the features that these plugins provide, you need to write a custom track.
Rally will use several techniques to install and configure plugins:
- First, Rally checks whether directory
plugins/PLUGIN_NAME
in the currently configured team repository exists. If this is the case, then plugin installation and configuration details will be read from this directory. - Next, Rally will use the provided plugin name when running the Elasticsearch plugin installer. With this approach we can avoid to create a plugin configuration directory in the team repository for very simple plugins that do not need any configuration.
As mentioned above, Rally also allows you to specify a plugin configuration and you can even combine them. Here are some examples:
- Run a benchmark with the
x-pack
plugin in thesecurity
configuration:--elasticsearch-plugins=xpack:security
- Run a benchmark with the
x-pack
plugin in thesecurity
and thegraph
configuration:--elasticsearch-plugins=xpack:security+graph
Note
To benchmark the security
configuration of x-pack
you need to add the following command line options: --client-options="use_ssl:true,verify_certs:false,basic_auth_user:'rally',basic_auth_password:'rally-password'" --cluster-health=yellow
If you are behind a proxy, please set the environment variable ES_JAVA_OPTS
accordingly on each target machine as described in the Elasticsearch plugin documentation.
Building plugins from sources¶
Plugin authors may want to benchmark source builds of their plugins. To make this work, you need to manually edit Rally’s configuration file in ~/.rally/rally.ini
. Suppose, we want to benchmark the plugin “my-plugin”. Then you need to add the following entries in the source
section:
plugin.my-plugin.remote.repo.url = git@github.com:example-org/my-plugin.git
plugin.my-plugin.src.subdir = elasticsearch-extra/my-plugin
plugin.my-plugin.build.task = :my-plugin:plugin:assemble
plugin.my-plugin.build.artifact.subdir = plugin/build/distributions
Let’s discuss these properties one by one:
plugin.my-plugin.remote.repo.url
: This is needed to let Rally checkout the source code of the plugin. If this is a private repo, credentials need to be setup properly.plugin.my-plugin.src.subdir
: This is the directory to which the plugin will be checked out relative tosrc.root.dir
. In order to allow to build the plugin alongside Elasticsearch, the plugin needs to reside in a subdirectory ofelasticsearch-extra
(see also the Elasticsearch testing documentation.plugin.my-plugin.build.task
: The Gradle task to run in order to build the plugin artifact. Note that his command is run from the Elasticsearch source directory as Rally assumes that you want to build your plugin alongside Elasticsearch. Mixing released Elasticsearch distributions with plugin source builds is not supported (nor is there an intention to do so).plugin.my-plugin.build.artifact.subdir
: This is the subdirectory relative toplugin.my-plugin.src.subdir
in which the final plugin artifact is located.
In order to run a benchmark with my-plugin
, you’d invoke Rally as follows: esrally --revision="elasticsearch:some-elasticsearch-revision,my-plugin:some-plugin-revision" --elasticsearch-plugins="my-plugin"
where you need to replace some-elasticsearch-revision
and some-plugin-revision
with the appropriate git revisions. Adjust other command line parameters (like track or car) accordingly. In order for this to work, you need to ensure that:
- All prerequisites for source builds are installed.
- The Elasticsearch source revision is compatible with the chosen plugin revision. Note that you do not need to know the revision hash to build against an already released version and can use git tags instead. E.g. if you want to benchmark against Elasticsearch 5.6.1, you c0an specify
--revision="elasticsearch:v5.6.1,my-plugin:some-plugin-revision"
(see e.g. the Elasticsearch tags on Github or usegit tag
in the Elasticsearch source directory on the console). - If your plugin needs to be configured, please ensure to create a proper plugin specification (see below).
Note
Rally can build all Elasticsearch core plugins out of the box without any further configuration.
Anatomy of a plugin specification¶
Simple plugins¶
You can use Rally to benchmark community-contributed or even your own plugins. In the simplest case, the plugin does not need any custom configuration. Then you just need to add the download URL to your Rally configuration file. Consider we want to benchmark the plugin “my-plugin”:
[distributions]
plugin.my-plugin.release.url=https://example.org/my-plugin/releases/{{VERSION}}/my-plugin-{{VERSION}}.zip
Then you can use --elasticsearch-plugins=my-plugin
to run a benchmark with your plugin. Rally will also replace {{VERSION}}
with the distribution version that you have specified on the command line.
Plugins which require configuration¶
If the plugin needs a custom configuration we recommend to fork the official Rally teams repository and add your plugin configuration there. Suppose, you want to benchmark “my-plugin” which has the following settings that can be configured in elasticsearch.yml
:
myplugin.active
: a boolean which activates the pluginmyplugin.mode
: Eithersimple
oradvanced
We want to support two configurations for this plugin: simple
which will set myplugin.mode
to simple
and advanced
which will set myplugin.mode
to advanced
.
First, we need a template configuration. We will call this a “config base” in Rally. We will just need one config base for this example and will call it “default”.
In $TEAM_REPO_ROOT
create the directory structure for the plugin and its config base with mkdir -p myplugin/default/config and add the following elasticsearch.yml
in the new directory:
myplugin.active: true
myplugin.mode={{my_plugin_mode}}
That’s it. Later, Rally will just copy all files in myplugin/default
to the home directory of the Elasticsearch node that it configures. First, Rally will always apply the car’s configuration and then plugins can add their configuration on top. This also explains why we have created a config/elasticsearch.yml
. Rally will just copy this file and replace template variables on the way.
Note
If you create a new customization for a plugin, ensure that the plugin name in the team repository matches the core plugin name. Note that hyphens need to be replaced by underscores (e.g. “x-pack” becomes “x_pack”). The reason is that Rally allows to write custom install hooks and the plugin name will become the root package name of the install hook. However, hyphens are not supported in Python which is why we use underscores instead.
The next step is now to create our two plugin configurations where we will set the variables for our config base “default”. Create a file simple.ini
in the myplugin
directory:
[config]
# reference our one and only config base here
base=default
[variables]
my_plugin_mode=simple
Similarly, create advanced.ini
in the myplugin
directory:
[config]
# reference our one and only config base here
base=default
[variables]
my_plugin_mode=advanced
Rally will now know about myplugin
and its two configurations. Let’s check that with esrally list elasticsearch-plugins
:
Available Elasticsearch plugins:
Name Configuration
----------------------- ----------------
analysis-icu
analysis-kuromoji
analysis-phonetic
analysis-smartcn
analysis-stempel
analysis-ukrainian
discovery-azure-classic
discovery-ec2
discovery-file
discovery-gce
ingest-attachment
ingest-geoip
ingest-user-agent
lang-javascript
lang-python
mapper-attachments
mapper-murmur3
mapper-size
myplugin simple
myplugin advanced
repository-azure
repository-gcs
repository-hdfs
repository-s3
store-smb
x-pack monitoring-local
x-pack security
As myplugin
is not a core plugin, the Elasticsearch plugin manager does not know from where to install it, so we need to add the download URL to ~/.rally/rally.ini
as before:
[distributions]
plugin.myplugin.release.url=https://example.org/myplugin/releases/{{VERSION}}/myplugin-{{VERSION}}.zip
Now you can run benchmarks with the custom Elasticsearch plugin, e.g. with esrally --distribution-version=5.5.0 --elasticsearch-plugins="myplugin:simple"
.
For this to work you need ensure two things:
- The plugin needs to be available for the version that you want to benchmark (5.5.0 in the example above).
- Rally will choose the most appropriate branch in the team repository before starting the benchmark. In practice, this will most likely be branch “5” for this example. Therefore you need to ensure that your plugin configuration is also available on that branch. See the README in the team repository to learn how the versioning scheme works.
Telemetry Devices¶
You probably want to gain additional insights from a race. Therefore, we have added telemetry devices to Rally. If you invoke
esrally list telemetry
, it will show which telemetry devices are available:
dm@io:Projects/rally ‹master*›$ esrally list telemetry
____ ____
/ __ \____ _/ / /_ __
/ /_/ / __ `/ / / / / /
/ _, _/ /_/ / / / /_/ /
/_/ |_|\__,_/_/_/\__, /
/____/
Available telemetry devices:
Command Name Description
--------- --------------------- -----------------------------------------------------
jit JIT Compiler Profiler Enables JIT compiler logs.
gc GC log Enables GC logs.
jfr Flight Recorder Enables Java Flight Recorder (requires an Oracle JDK)
perf perf stat Reads CPU PMU counters (requires Linux and perf)
Keep in mind that each telemetry device may incur a runtime overhead which can skew results.
You can attach one or more of these telemetry devices to the benchmarked cluster. However, this only works if Rally provisions the cluster (i.e. it does not work with --pipeline=benchmark-only
).
jfr¶
The jfr
telemetry device enables the Java Flight Recorder on the benchmark candidate. Java Flight Recorder ships only with Oracle JDK, so Rally assumes that Oracle JDK is used for benchmarking.
To enable jfr
, invoke Rally with esrally --telemetry jfr
. jfr
will then write a flight recording file which can be opened in Java Mission Control. Rally prints the location of the flight recording file on the command line.
Note
The licensing terms of Java flight recorder do not allow you to run it in production environments without a valid license (for details, please refer to the Oracle Java SE Advanced & Suite Products page). However, running in a QA environment is fine.
jit¶
The jit
telemetry device enables JIT compiler logs for the benchmark candidate. If the HotSpot disassembler library is available, the logs will also contain the disassembled JIT compiler output which can be used for low-level analysis. We recommend to use JITWatch for analysis.
hsdis
can be built for JDK 8 on Linux with (based on a description by Alex Blewitt):
curl -O -O -O -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dmlloyd/openjdk/jdk8u/jdk8u/hotspot/src/share/tools/hsdis/{hsdis.c,hsdis.h,Makefile,README}
mkdir -p build/binutils
curl http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/binutils-2.27.tar.gz | tar --strip-components=1 -C build/binutils -z -x -f -
make BINUTILS=build/binutils ARCH=amd64
After it has been built, the binary needs to be copied to the JDK directory (see README
of hsdis for details).
gc¶
The gc
telemetry device enables GC logs for the benchmark candidate. You can use tools like GCViewer to analyze the GC logs.
perf¶
The perf
telemetry device runs perf stat
on each benchmarked node and writes the output to a log file. It can be used to capture low-level CPU statistics. Note that the perf tool, which is only available on Linux, must be installed before using this telemetry device.
Rally Daemon¶
At its heart, Rally is a distributed system, just like Elasticsearch. However, in its simplest form you will not notice, because all components of Rally can run on a single node too. If you want Rally to configure and start Elasticsearch nodes remotely or distribute the load test driver to apply load from multiple machines, you need to use Rally daemon.
Rally daemon needs to run on every machine that should be under Rally’s control. We can consider three different roles:
- Benchmark coordinator: This is the machine where you invoke
esrally
. It is responsible for user interaction, coordinates the whole benchmark and shows the results. Only one node can be the benchmark coordinator. - Load driver: Nodes of this type will interpret and run tracks.
- Provisioner: Nodes of this type will configure an Elasticsearch cluster according to the provided car and Elasticsearch plugin configurations.
The two latter roles are not statically preassigned but rather determined by Rally based on the command line parameter --load-driver-hosts
(for the load driver) and --target-hosts
(for the provisioner).
Preparation¶
First, install and configure Rally on all machines that are involved in the benchmark. If you want to automate this, there is no need to use the interactive configuration routine of Rally. You can copy ~/.rally/rally.ini to the target machines adapting the paths in the file as necessary. We also recommend that you copy ~/.rally/benchmarks/data
to all load driver machines before-hand. Otherwise, each load driver machine will need to download a complete copy of the benchmark data.
Note
Rally Daemon will listen on port 1900 so please ensure to open that port on your firewall.
Starting¶
For all this to work, Rally needs to form a cluster. This is achieved with the binary esrallyd
(note the “d” - for daemon - at the end). You need to start the Rally daemon on all nodes: First on the coordinator node, then on all others. The order does matter, because nodes attempt to connect to the coordinator on startup.
On the benchmark coordinator, issue:
esrallyd start --node-ip=IP_OF_COORDINATOR_NODE --coordinator-ip=IP_OF_COORDINATOR_NODE
On all other nodes, issue:
esrallyd start --node-ip=IP_OF_THIS_NODE --coordinator-ip=IP_OF_COORDINATOR_NODE
After that, all Rally nodes, know about each other and you can use Rally as usual. Please see the recipes for more examples.
Stopping¶
You can leave the Rally daemon processes running in case you want to run multiple benchmarks. When you are done, you can stop the Rally daemon on each node with:
esrallyd stop
Contrary to startup, order does not matter here.
Pipelines¶
A pipeline is a series of steps that are performed to get benchmark results. This is not intended to customize the actual benchmark but rather what happens before and after a benchmark.
An example will clarify the concept: If you want to benchmark a binary distribution of Elasticsearch, Rally has to download a distribution archive, decompress it, start Elasticsearch and then run the benchmark. However, if you want to benchmark a source build of Elasticsearch, it first has to build a distribution with Gradle. So, in both cases, different steps are involved and that’s what pipelines are for.
You can get a list of all pipelines with esrally list pipelines
:
Available pipelines:
Name Description
----------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
from-distribution Downloads an Elasticsearch distribution, provisions it, runs a benchmark and reports results.
from-sources-complete Builds and provisions Elasticsearch, runs a benchmark and reports results.
benchmark-only Assumes an already running Elasticsearch instance, runs a benchmark and reports results
from-sources-skip-build Provisions Elasticsearch (skips the build), runs a benchmark and reports results.
benchmark-only¶
This is intended if you want to provision a cluster by yourself. Do not use this pipeline unless you are absolutely sure you need to. As Rally has not provisioned the cluster, results are not easily reproducable and it also cannot gather a lot of metrics (like CPU usage).
To benchmark a cluster, you also have to specify the hosts to connect to. An example invocation:
esrally --pipeline=benchmark-only --target-hosts=search-node-a.intranet.acme.com:9200,search-node-b.intranet.acme.com:9200
from-distribution¶
This pipeline allows to benchmark an official Elasticsearch distribution which will be automatically downloaded by Rally. The earliest supported version is Elasticsearch 1.7.0. An example invocation:
esrally --pipeline=from-distribution --distribution-version=1.7.5
The version numbers have to match the name in the download URL path.
You can also benchmark Elasticsearch snapshot versions by specifying the snapshot repository:
esrally --pipeline=from-distribution --distribution-version=5.0.0-SNAPSHOT --distribution-repository=snapshot
However, this feature is mainly intended for continuous integration environments and by default you should just benchmark official distributions.
Note
This pipeline is just mentioned for completeness but Rally will autoselect it for you. All you need to do is to define the --distribution-version
flag.
from-sources-complete¶
You should use this pipeline when you want to build and benchmark Elasticsearch from sources. This pipeline will only work from Elasticsearch 5.0 onwards because Elasticsearch switched from Maven to Gradle and Rally only supports one build tool in the interest of maintainability.
Remember that you also need to install git and Gradle before and Rally needs to be configured for building for sources. If that’s not the case you’ll get an error and have to run esrally configure
first. An example invocation:
esrally --pipeline=from-sources-complete --revision=latest
You have to specify a revision.
Note
This pipeline is just mentioned for completeness but Rally will automatically select it for you. All you need to do is to define the --revision
flag.
from-sources-skip-build¶
This pipeline is similar to from-sources-complete
except that it assumes you have built the binary once. It saves time if you want to run a benchmark twice for the exact same version of Elasticsearch. Obviously it doesn’t make sense to provide a revision: It is always the previously built revision. An example invocation:
esrally --pipeline=from-sources-skip-build
Metrics¶
Metrics Records¶
At the end of a race, Rally stores all metrics records in its metrics store, which is a dedicated Elasticsearch cluster. Rally stores the metrics in the indices rally-metrics-*
. It will create a new index for each month.
Here is a typical metrics record:
{
"environment": "nightly",
"track": "geonames",
"challenge": "append-no-conflicts",
"car": "defaults",
"sample-type": "normal",
"trial-timestamp": "20160421T042749Z",
"@timestamp": 1461213093093,
"relative-time": 10507328,
"name": "throughput",
"value": 27385,
"unit": "docs/s",
"operation": "index-append-no-conflicts",
"operation-type": "Index",
"lap": 1,
"meta": {
"cpu_physical_cores": 36,
"cpu_logical_cores": 72,
"cpu_model": "Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2699 v3 @ 2.30GHz",
"os_name": "Linux",
"os_version": "3.19.0-21-generic",
"host_name": "beast2",
"node_name": "rally-node0",
"source_revision": "a6c0a81",
"distribution_version": "5.0.0-SNAPSHOT",
"tag_reference": "Github ticket 1234",
}
}
As you can see, we do not only store the metrics name and its value but lots of meta-information. This allows you to create different visualizations and reports in Kibana.
Below we describe each field in more detail.
environment¶
The environment describes the origin of a metric record. You define this value in the initial configuration of Rally. The intention is to clearly separate different benchmarking environments but still allow to store them in the same index.
track, challenge, car¶
This is the track, challenge and car for which the metrics record has been produced. Note that if you specify a car with mixins, it will be stored as one string separated with “+”, e.g. --car="4gheap,ea"
will be stored as 4gheap+ea
in the metrics store in order to simplify querying in Kibana. For more details, please see the cars documentation.
sample-type¶
Rally runs warmup trials but records all samples. Normally, we are just interested in “normal” samples but for a full picture we might want to look also at “warmup” samples.
trial-timestamp¶
A constant timestamp (always in UTC) that is determined when Rally is invoked. It is intended to group all samples of a benchmark trial.
@timestamp¶
The timestamp in milliseconds since epoch determined when the sample was taken.
relative-time¶
The relative time in microseconds since the start of the benchmark. This is useful for comparing time-series graphs over multiple trials, e.g. you might want to compare the indexing throughput over time across multiple benchmark trials. Obviously, they should always start at the same (relative) point in time and absolute timestamps are useless for that.
name, value, unit¶
This is the actual metric name and value with an optional unit (counter metrics don’t have a unit). Depending on the nature of a metric, it is either sampled periodically by Rally, e.g. the CPU utilization or query latency or just measured once like the final size of the index.
operation, operation-type¶
operation
is the name of the operation (as specified in the track file) that ran when this metric has been gathered. It will only be set for metrics with name latency
and throughput
.
operation-type
is the more abstract type of an operation. During a race, multiple queries may be issued which are different operation``s but they all have the same ``operation-type
(Search). For some metrics, only the operation type matters, e.g. it does not make any sense to attribute the CPU usage to an individual query but instead attribute it just to the operation type.
lap¶
The lap number in which this metric was gathered. Laps start at 1. See the command line reference for more info on laps.
meta¶
Rally captures also some meta information for each metric record:
- CPU info: number of physical and logical cores and also the model name
- OS info: OS name and version
- Host name
- Node name: If Rally provisions the cluster, it will choose a unique name for each node.
- Source revision: We always record the git hash of the version of Elasticsearch that is benchmarked. This is even done if you benchmark an official binary release.
- Distribution version: We always record the distribution version of Elasticsearch that is benchmarked. This is even done if you benchmark a source release.
- Custom tag: You can define one custom tag with the command line flag
--user-tag
. The tag is prefixed bytag_
in order to avoid accidental clashes with Rally internal tags. - Operation-specific: The optional substructure
operation
contains additional information depending on the type of operation. For bulk requests, this may be the number of documents or for searches the number of hits.
Note that depending on the “level” of a metric record, certain meta information might be missing. It makes no sense to record host level meta info for a cluster wide metric record, like a query latency (as it cannot be attributed to a single node).
Metric Keys¶
Rally stores the following metrics:
latency
: Time period between submission of a request and receiving the complete response. It also includes wait time, i.e. the time the request spends waiting until it is ready to be serviced by Elasticsearch.service_time
Time period between start of request processing and receiving the complete response. This metric can easily be mixed up withlatency
but does not include waiting time. This is what most load testing tools refer to as “latency” (although it is incorrect).throughput
: Number of operations that Elasticsearch can perform within a certain time period, usually per second. See the track reference for a definition of what is meant by one “operation” for each operation type.merge_parts_total_time_*
: Different merge times as reported by Lucene. Only available if Lucene index writer trace logging is enabled.merge_parts_total_docs_*
: Seemerge_parts_total_time_*
disk_io_write_bytes
: number of bytes that have been written to disk during the benchmark. On Linux this metric reports only the bytes that have been written by Elasticsearch, on Mac OS X it reports the number of bytes written by all processes.disk_io_read_bytes
: number of bytes that have been read from disk during the benchmark. The same caveats apply on Mac OS X as fordisk_io_write_bytes
.cpu_utilization_1s
: CPU usage in percent of the Elasticsearch process based on a one second sample period. The maximum value is N * 100% where N is the number of CPU cores available.node_total_old_gen_gc_time
: The total runtime of the old generation garbage collector across the whole cluster as reported by the node stats API.node_total_young_gen_gc_time
: The total runtime of the young generation garbage collector across the whole cluster as reported by the node stats API.segments_count
: Total number of segments as reported by the indices stats API.segments_memory_in_bytes
: Number of bytes used for segments as reported by the indices stats API.segments_doc_values_memory_in_bytes
: Number of bytes used for doc values as reported by the indices stats API.segments_stored_fields_memory_in_bytes
: Number of bytes used for stored fields as reported by the indices stats API.segments_terms_memory_in_bytes
: Number of bytes used for terms as reported by the indices stats API.segments_norms_memory_in_bytes
: Number of bytes used for norms as reported by the indices stats API.segments_points_memory_in_bytes
: Number of bytes used for points as reported by the indices stats API.merges_total_time
: Total runtime of merges as reported by the indices stats API. Note that this is not Wall clock time (i.e. if M merge threads ran for N minutes, we will report M * N minutes, not N minutes).merges_total_throttled_time
: Total time within merges have been throttled as reported by the indices stats API. Note that this is not Wall clock time.indexing_total_time
: Total time used for indexing as reported by the indices stats API. Note that this is not Wall clock time.refresh_total_time
: Total time used for index refresh as reported by the indices stats API. Note that this is not Wall clock time.flush_total_time
: Total time used for index flush as reported by the indices stats API. Note that this is not Wall clock time.final_index_size_bytes
: Final resulting index size after the benchmark.
Summary Report¶
At the end of each race, Rally shows a summary report. Below we’ll explain the meaning of each line including a reference to its corresponding metrics key which can be helpful if you want to build your own reports in Kibana. Note that not every summary report will show all lines.
Indexing time¶
- Definition: Total time used for indexing as reported by the indices stats API. Note that this is not Wall clock time (i.e. if M indexing threads ran for N minutes, we will report M * N minutes, not N minutes).
- Corresponding metrics key:
indexing_total_time
Merge time¶
- Definition: Total runtime of merges as reported by the indices stats API. Note that this is not Wall clock time.
- Corresponding metrics key:
merges_total_time
Refresh time¶
- Definition: Total time used for index refresh as reported by the indices stats API. Note that this is not Wall clock time.
- Corresponding metrics key:
refresh_total_time
Flush time¶
- Definition: Total time used for index flush as reported by the indices stats API. Note that this is not Wall clock time.
- Corresponding metrics key:
flush_total_time
Merge throttle time¶
- Definition: Total time within merges have been throttled as reported by the indices stats API. Note that this is not Wall clock time.
- Corresponding metrics key:
merges_total_throttled_time
Merge time (X
)¶
Where X
is one of:
- postings
- stored fields
- doc values
- norms
- vectors
- points
- Definition: Different merge times as reported by Lucene. Only available if Lucene index writer trace logging is enabled (use the car verbose_iw for that).
- Corresponding metrics keys:
merge_parts_total_time_*
Median CPU usage¶
- Definition: Median CPU usage in percent of the Elasticsearch process during the whole race based on a one second sample period. The maximum value is N * 100% where N is the number of CPU cores available
- Corresponding metrics key:
cpu_utilization_1s
Total Young Gen GC¶
- Definition: The total runtime of the young generation garbage collector across the whole cluster as reported by the node stats API.
- Corresponding metrics key:
node_total_young_gen_gc_time
Total Old Gen GC¶
- Definition: The total runtime of the old generation garbage collector across the whole cluster as reported by the node stats API.
- Corresponding metrics key:
node_total_old_gen_gc_time
Index size¶
- Definition: Final resulting index size after the benchmark.
- Corresponding metrics key:
final_index_size_bytes
Totally written¶
- Definition: number of bytes that have been written to disk during the benchmark. On Linux this metric reports only the bytes that have been written by Elasticsearch, on Mac OS X it reports the number of bytes written by all processes.
- Corresponding metrics key:
disk_io_write_bytes
Heap used for X
¶
Where X
is one of:
- doc values
- terms
- norms
- points
- stored fields
- Definition: Number of bytes used for the corresponding item as reported by the indices stats API.
- Corresponding metrics keys:
segments_*_in_bytes
Segment count¶
- Definition: Total number of segments as reported by the indices stats API.
- Corresponding metrics key:
segments_count
Throughput¶
Rally reports the minimum, median and maximum throughput for each operation.
- Definition: Number of operations that Elasticsearch can perform within a certain time period, usually per second.
- Corresponding metrics key:
throughput
Latency¶
Rally reports several percentile numbers for each operation. Which percentiles are shown depends on how many requests Rally could capture (i.e. Rally will not show a 99.99th percentile if it could only capture five samples because that would be a vanity metric).
- Definition: Time period between submission of a request and receiving the complete response. It also includes wait time, i.e. the time the request spends waiting until it is ready to be serviced by Elasticsearch.
- Corresponding metrics key:
latency
Service time¶
Rally reports several percentile numbers for each operation. Which percentiles are shown depends on how many requests Rally could capture (i.e. Rally will not show a 99.99th percentile if it could only capture five samples because that would be a vanity metric).
- Definition: Time period between start of request processing and receiving the complete response. This metric can easily be mixed up with
latency
but does not include waiting time. This is what most load testing tools refer to as “latency” (although it is incorrect). - Corresponding metrics key:
service_time
Error rate¶
- Definition: The ratio of erroneous responses relative to the total number of responses. Any exception thrown by the Python Elasticsearch client is considered erroneous (e.g. HTTP response codes 4xx, 5xx or network errors (network unreachable)). For specific details, please check the reference documentation of the Elasticsearch client. Usually any error rate greater than zero is alerting. You should investigate the root cause by inspecting Rally and Elasticearch logs and rerun the benchmark.
- Corresponding metrics key:
service_time
. Eachservice_time
record has ameta.success
flag. Rally simply counts how often this flag istrue
andfalse
respectively.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)¶
A benchmark aborts with Couldn't find a tar.gz distribution
. What’s the problem?¶
This error occurs when Rally cannot build an Elasticsearch distribution from source code. The most likely cause is that there is some problem in the build setup.
To see what’s the problem, try building Elasticsearch yourself. First, find out where the source code is located (run grep src ~/.rally/rally.ini
). Then change to the directory (src.root.dir
+ elasticsearch.src.subdir
which is usually ~/.rally/benchmarks/src/elasticsearch
) and run the following commands:
gradle clean
gradle :distribution:tar:assemble
By that you are mimicking what Rally does. Fix any errors that show up here and then retry.
Where does Rally get the benchmark data from?¶
Rally comes with a set of tracks out of the box which we maintain in the rally-tracks repository on Github. This repository contains the track descriptions. The actual data are stored as compressed files in an S3 bucket.
Will Rally destroy my existing indices?¶
First of all: Please (please, please) do NOT run Rally against your production cluster if you are just getting started with it. You have been warned.
Depending on the track, Rally will delete and create one or more indices. For example, the geonames track specifies that Rally should create an index named “geonames” and Rally will assume it can do to this index whatever it wants. Specifically, Rally will check at the beginning of a race if the index “geonames” exists and delete it. After that it creates a new empty “geonames” index and runs the benchmark. So if you benchmark against your own cluster (by specifying the benchmark-only
pipeline) and this cluster contains an index that is called “geonames” you will lose (all) data if you run Rally against it. Rally will neither read nor write (or delete) any other index. So if you apply the usual care nothing bad can happen.
Where and how long does Rally keep its data?¶
Rally stores a lot of data (this is just the nature of a benchmark) so you should keep an eye on disk usage. All data are kept in ~/.rally
and Rally does not implicitly delete them. These are the most important directories:
~/.rally/logs
: Contains all log files. Logs are rotated daily. If you don’t need the logs anymore, you can safely wipe this directory.~/.rally/benchmarks/races
: telemetry data, Elasticsearch logs and even complete Elasticsearch installations including the data directory if a benchmark failed. If you don’t need the data anymore, you can safely wipe this directory.~/.rally/benchmarks/src
: the Elasticsearch Github repository (only if you had Rally build Elasticsearch from sources at least once).~/.rally/benchmarks/data
: the benchmark data sets. This directory can get very huge (way more than 100 GB if you want to try all default tracks). You can delete the files in this directory but keep in mind that Rally may needs to download them again.~/.rally/benchmarks/distributions
: Contains all downloaded Elasticsearch distributions.
There are a few more directories but the ones above are the most disk-hogging ones.
Does Rally spy on me?¶
No. Rally does not collect or send any usage data and also the complete source code is open. We do value your feedback a lot though and if you got any ideas for improvements, found a bug or have any other feedback, please head over to Rally’s Discuss forum or raise an issue on Github.
Do I need an Internet connection?¶
You do NOT need Internet access on any node of your Elasticsearch cluster but the machine where you start Rally needs an Internet connection to download track data sets and Elasticsearch distributions. After it has downloaded all data, an Internet connection is not required anymore and you can specify --offline
. If Rally detects no active Internet connection, it will automatically enable offline mode and warn you.
As a workaround you can also download all data on a different machine and transfer it the the target machine but this is not actively supported.
Glossary¶
- track
- A track is the description of one ore more benchmarking scenarios with a specific document corpus. It defines for example the involved indices, data files and which operations are invoked. List the available tracks with
esrally list tracks
. Although Rally ships with some tracks out of the box, you should usually create your own track based on your own data. - challenge
- A challenge describes one benchmarking scenario, for example indexing documents at maximum throughput with 4 clients while issuing term and phrase queries from another two clients rate-limited at 10 queries per second each. It is always specified in the context of a track. See the available challenges by listing the corresponding tracks with
esrally list tracks
. - car
- A car is a specific configuration of an Elasticsearch cluster that is benchmarked, for example the out-of-the-box configuration, a configuration with a specific heap size or a custom logging configuration. List the available cars with
esrally list cars
. - telemetry
- Telemetry is used in Rally to gather metrics about the car, for example CPU usage or index size.
- race
- A race is one invocation of the Rally binary. Another name for that is one “benchmarking trial”. During a race, Rally runs one challenge on a track with the given car.
- tournament
- A tournament is a comparison of two races. You can use Rally’s tournament mode for that.
Community Resources¶
Below are a few community resources about Rally. If you find an interesting article, talk or custom tracks, please raise an issue or open a pull request.
Talks¶
Articles¶
Using Rally to benchmark Elasticsearch queries by Darren Smith
License¶
This software is licensed under the Apache License, version 2 (“ALv2”), quoted below.
Copyright 2015-2017 Elasticsearch <https://www.elastic.co>
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.