Rubberband Flamethrower

Rubberband Flamethrower is a gem for inserting faked data into an Elastic Search server and providing basic benchmarks. It creates and inserts fake data objects with three fields (message, username, and post_date) and times the process. It inserts in batches of 500 objects by default but can be configured to insert any number of objects. Here is an sample generated data object:

{
	"message":"utilizing plowed popularizing demeanor anesthesia specializes chaperon pedaling.",
	"username":"pummeling",
	"post_date":"20130408T15:41:28"
}

You should install and have an Elastic Search node running before trying to use this gem.

Download Elastic Search:

curl -k -L -o elasticsearch-0.20.6.tar.gz http://download.elasticsearch.org/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-0.20.6.tar.gz

Unarchive Elastic Search:

tar -zxvf elasticsearch-0.20.6.tar.gz

Start an Elastic Search node:

./elasticsearch-0.20.6/bin/elasticsearch -f

It has been designed with ruby 1.9.1 and above in mind. The sample method of the Array class is used in the code and was not a part of the 1.8.7 release.

install the gem manually

gem install rubberband_flamethrower

Or if you will be using this as a part of a Rails project, you can add the gem to your Gemfile and then bundle install.

Once the gem is installed and you have an Elastic Search server running you are ready to begin inserting fake data. You can run the gem from the command line using the "flamethrower" command.

To start a batch insert into the local Elastic Search server you add the argument "fire" to the command:

flamethrower fire

By default it will insert 500 documents starting with document ID 1 into an Elastic Search index named "twitter" of type "tweet" into a server node located at http://localhost:9200.

You can configure what is inserted by passing additional parameters. The parameters accepted by the flamethrower fire command all have a default value if left blank. Here are the parameters in order with their default values: (how_many=500, starting_id=1, server_url="http://localhost:9200", index="twitter", type="tweet")

To Insert 10,000 instead of 500:

flamethrower fire 10000

To Insert 5,000 starting with the ID 5001

flamethrower fire 5000 5001

To Insert 2,000 starting with the ID 1 to a server located at http://es.com:9200

flamethrower fire 2000 1 "http://es.com:9200"

To put your documents into an index named "facebook" instead of "twitter" with a type of "message" instead of "tweet"

flamethrower fire 500 1 "http://localhost:9200" "facebook" "message"

The "auto" argument can be used to repeatedly run the "flamethrower fire" command, timing each run. By default it will run the command 3 times.

flamethrower auto

This can be configured much like the above example with two additional parameters, which is supplied first and represents the number of times to run the "flamethrower fire" command. Here are the parameters in order with their default values: (how_many_batches=3, per_batch=500, starting_id=1, server_url="http://localhost:9200", index="twitter", type="tweet", id_overwrite="n")

To run the "flamethrower fire" command 5 times in a row instead of the default 3:

flamethrower auto 5

To run the "flamethrower fire" command 5 times, inserting 5,000 objects each time:

flamethrower auto 5 5000

The id_overwrite parameter determines the ID strategy used for subsequent batches in the auto command. When set to "n" ("n" is the default) each batch will be writing new data with unused IDs to the Elastic Search server, simulating a system where new data is constantly being inserted and not updated. 5 batches of 500 with an "n" would use the IDs 1-2500. When it is set to "y" each batch (after the first) will be overwriting existing data on the Elastic Search server, simulating a system where data is constantly being updated (after the initial batch). 5 batches of 500 with a setting of "y" would use the IDs 1-500 on each batch.

The "generate_dataset" command can be used to create a set of documents for insertion that can be used over and over. This is useful when you are benchmarking one possible configuration against another and want to use consistent data for each run. The generated file will contain one JSON document per line.

flamethrower generate_dataset

This will generate a batch of 500 documents and store it in a local file called "dataset". You can configure the size of the dataset or the filename of the dataset by providing additional parameters to the command.

To generate a dataset of 10,000 documents in a file called dataset2:

flamethrower generate_dataset 10000 "dataset2"

The "load_dataset" command can be used much like the "fire" command only the data inserted will come from the dataset file rather than being randomly generated. You can create your own dataset file if you would like.

flamethrower load_dataset

The command can be configured much like the "fire" command, but the first parameter accepted is not the number of documents to generate and insert but is instead the filename of the dataset. The parameters in order with their default values: (filename="dataset", starting_id=1, server_url="http://localhost:9200", index="twitter", type="tweet")

You do not have to use a dataset generated by this gem. You can create your own file. The file should contain the JSON documents you want to insert, separated by a \n character.

The command with the argument "help" or without any arguments will display the help screen:

flamethrower help

Instead of using the gem from the command line you may want to use this gem from inside of a ruby script or through IRB.

First require the gem:

require 'rubberband_flamethrower'

Then you are ready to use it!

RubberbandFlamethrower.fire

By default it will insert 500 documents starting with document ID 1 into an Elastic Search index named "twitter" of type "tweet" into a server node located at http://localhost:9200.

The fire method can be configured by passing parameters to it. There are 5 parameters accepted by the fire method, all of which have a default value if left blank. Here are the parameters in order with their default values: (how_many=500, starting_id=1, server_url="http://localhost:9200", index="twitter", type="tweet")

To Insert 10,000 instead of 500:

RubberbandFlamethrower.fire(10000)

To Insert 5,000 starting with the ID 5001

RubberbandFlamethrower.fire(5000, 5001)

To Insert 2,000 starting with the ID 1 to a server located at http://es.com:9200

RubberbandFlamethrower.fire(2000, 1,"http://es.com:9200")

To put your documents into an index named "facebook" instead of "twitter" with a type of "message" instead of "tweet"

RubberbandFlamethrower.fire(500, 1, "http://localhost:9200", "facebook", "message")

• Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn't been implemented or the bug hasn't been fixed yet.
• Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn't requested it and/or contributed it.
• Fork the project.
• Start a feature/bugfix branch.
• Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution.
• Make sure to add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
• Please try not to mess with the Rakefile, version, or history. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate to its own commit so I can cherry-pick around it.

Copyright (c) 2013 Michael Orr. See LICENSE.txt for further details.