A "race" in Rally is the execution of a benchmarking experiment. You can choose different benchmarking scenarios (called :doc:`tracks </track>`) for your benchmarks.
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 ------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------- ----------------- ------------------- ----------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- eql EQL benchmarks based on endgame index of SIEM demo cluster 60,782,211 4.5 GB 109.2 GB default default eventdata This benchmark indexes HTTP access logs generated based sample logs from the elastic.co website using the generator available in https://github.com/elastic/rally-eventdata-track 20,000,000 756.0 MB 15.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,transform geonames POIs from Geonames 11,396,503 252.9 MB 3.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,append-no-conflicts-index-only,append-sorted-no-conflicts,append-fast-with-conflicts,significant-text geopoint Point coordinates from PlanetOSM 60,844,404 482.1 MB 2.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,append-no-conflicts-index-only,append-fast-with-conflicts geopointshape Point coordinates from PlanetOSM indexed as geoshapes 60,844,404 470.8 MB 2.6 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,append-no-conflicts-index-only,append-fast-with-conflicts geoshape Shapes from PlanetOSM 60,523,283 13.4 GB 45.4 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts http_logs HTTP server log data 247,249,096 1.2 GB 31.1 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,runtime-fields,append-no-conflicts-index-only,append-sorted-no-conflicts,append-index-only-with-ingest-pipeline,update,append-no-conflicts-index-reindex-only metricbeat Metricbeat data 1,079,600 87.7 MB 1.2 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts nested StackOverflow Q&A stored as nested docs 11,203,029 663.3 MB 3.4 GB nested-search-challenge nested-search-challenge,index-only noaa Global daily weather measurements from NOAA 33,659,481 949.4 MB 9.0 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,append-no-conflicts-index-only,top_metrics,aggs nyc_taxis Taxi rides in New York in 2015 165,346,692 4.5 GB 74.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,append-no-conflicts-index-only,append-sorted-no-conflicts-index-only,update,append-ml,date-histogram,indexing-querying percolator Percolator benchmark based on AOL queries 2,000,000 121.1 kB 104.9 MB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts pmc Full text benchmark with academic papers from PMC 574,199 5.5 GB 21.7 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,append-no-conflicts-index-only,append-sorted-no-conflicts,append-fast-with-conflicts,indexing-querying so Indexing benchmark using up to questions and answers from StackOverflow 36,062,278 8.9 GB 33.1 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts
The first two columns show the name and a description of each track. A track also specifies one or more challenges which describe the workload to run. To get more details about a given track, refer to the README files in the rally-tracks repository.
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 race --distribution-version=6.0.0 --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:
$ esrally race --distribution-version=6.0.0 --track=geopoint --challenge=append-fast-with-conflicts
____ ____
/ __ \____ _/ / /_ __
/ /_/ / __ `/ / / / / /
/ _, _/ /_/ / / / /_/ /
/_/ |_|\__,_/_/_/\__, /
/____/
[INFO] Racing on track [geopoint], challenge [append-fast-with-conflicts] and car ['defaults'] with version [6.0.0].
[INFO] Downloading Elasticsearch 6.0.0 ... [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]
The benchmark will take a while to run, so be patient.
When the race has finished, Rally will show a summary on the command line:
| Metric | Task | Value | Unit | |--------------------------------:|-------------:|----------:|-------:| | Total indexing time | | 124.712 | min | | Total merge time | | 21.8604 | min | | Total refresh time | | 4.49527 | min | | Total merge throttle time | | 0.120433 | min | | Median CPU usage | | 546.5 | % | | Total Young Gen GC time | | 72.078 | s | | Total Young Gen GC count | | 43 | | | Total Old Gen GC time | | 3.426 | s | | Total Old Gen GC count | | 1 | | | Index size | | 2.26661 | GB | | Total 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 | | Mean Throughput | index-update | 60110.3 | 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 | | Mean 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 6.0.0
- 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, inspect the geopoint track specification or start to :doc:`write your own tracks </adding_tracks>`. You can also configure Rally to :doc:`store all data samples in Elasticsearch </configuration>` so you can analyze the results with Kibana. Finally, you may want to :doc:`change the Elasticsearch configuration </car>`.