I don't know what bottlenecks you had when were observing high resource usage in logstash, but, in general, if there's a performance problem, it is a bug, and we can fix it.
The next release of logstash (1.2.0 is in beta) has a 3.5x improvement in event throughput. For numbers: on my workstation at home (6 vcpu on virtualbox, host OS windows, 8gb ram, host cpu is FX-8150) - with logstash 1.1.13, I can process roughly 31,000 events/sec parsing apache logs. With logstash 1.2.0.beta1, I can process 102,000 events/sec.
Processing speed will vary greatly by what you are doing with your events and it doesn't make sense to generalize performance characteristics globally, especially with a metric that, alone, doesn't really tell me much (cpu utilization).
If it's slow, it's a bug. We can fix it. :)
Further, you can use hekad with logstash and with elasticsearch (one or both together, it doesn't matter).
In terms of problems solved, logstash helps solve transport and real-time processing problems. In cases where the logstash agent is too resource intensive, the logstash community offers many alternatives on this site: http://cookbook.logstash.net/recipes/log-shippers/
The community (myself included) is very interested in helping logstash be a success for its users, so if you do see performance problems, things that behave weirdly, or anything strange, it's probably a bug, and we can fix it.
that's good to hear. it could also have been a plugin that we were using that slowed things down. our log files are in csv so i wrote a plugin that uses ruby csv to parse lines and split them into key-value pairs based on String->List[String] hash we have. so it might have been the go csv parser has much better performance than the ruby csv parser.
The next release of logstash (1.2.0 is in beta) has a 3.5x improvement in event throughput. For numbers: on my workstation at home (6 vcpu on virtualbox, host OS windows, 8gb ram, host cpu is FX-8150) - with logstash 1.1.13, I can process roughly 31,000 events/sec parsing apache logs. With logstash 1.2.0.beta1, I can process 102,000 events/sec.
Processing speed will vary greatly by what you are doing with your events and it doesn't make sense to generalize performance characteristics globally, especially with a metric that, alone, doesn't really tell me much (cpu utilization).
If it's slow, it's a bug. We can fix it. :)
Further, you can use hekad with logstash and with elasticsearch (one or both together, it doesn't matter).
In terms of problems solved, logstash helps solve transport and real-time processing problems. In cases where the logstash agent is too resource intensive, the logstash community offers many alternatives on this site: http://cookbook.logstash.net/recipes/log-shippers/
The community (myself included) is very interested in helping logstash be a success for its users, so if you do see performance problems, things that behave weirdly, or anything strange, it's probably a bug, and we can fix it.
The short version of all of this is captured by the project principles listed in the logstash readme: https://github.com/logstash/logstash/#project-principles
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