A "race" in Rally is the execution of a benchmarking experiment. You can choose different benchmarking scenarios (called tracks </track>) for your benchmarks.
Start by finding out which tracks are available:
esrally list tracksThis will show the following list:
Name Description Documents Compressed Size Uncompressed Size Default Challenge All Challenges
---------- ------------------------------------------------- ----------- ----------------- ------------------- ----------------------- ---------------------------
geonames POIs from Geonames 11396505 252.4 MB 3.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,appe...
geopoint Point coordinates from PlanetOSM 60844404 481.9 MB 2.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,appe...
http_logs HTTP server log data 247249096 1.2 GB 31.1 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,appe...
nested StackOverflow Q&A stored as nested docs 11203029 663.1 MB 3.4 GB nested-search-challenge nested-search-challenge,...
noaa Global daily weather measurements from NOAA 33659481 947.3 MB 9.0 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,appe...
nyc_taxis Taxi rides in New York in 2015 165346692 4.5 GB 74.3 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,appe...
percolator Percolator benchmark based on AOL queries 2000000 102.7 kB 104.9 MB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,appe...
pmc Full text benchmark with academic papers from PMC 574199 5.5 GB 21.7 GB append-no-conflicts append-no-conflicts,appe...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.
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=6.0.0 --track=geopoint --challenge=append-fast-with-conflictsRally 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=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]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 | Task | 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 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, please inspect the geopoint track specification or start to write your own tracks </adding_tracks>. You can also configure Rally to store all data samples in Elasticsearch </configuration> so you can analyze the results with Kibana. Finally, you may want to change the Elasticsearch configuration </car>.