# Problem running my first benchmark with esrally - rally.launcher cannot start node

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/problem-running-my-first-benchmark-with-esrally-rally-launcher-cannot-start-node/61942>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Tags:** rally\
**Created:** [September 30, 2016, 4:04pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/problem-running-my-first-benchmark-with-esrally-rally-launcher-cannot-start-node/61942 "2016-09-30T16:04:33Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![uncas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/e8c25b/32.png) [@uncas](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/uncas)\
**Post date:** [September 30, 2016, 4:04pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/problem-running-my-first-benchmark-with-esrally-rally-launcher-cannot-start-node/61942/1 "2016-09-30T16:04:33Z")

</div>

Hi.  
I am new to ES and Rally. I'm trying to educate myself on benchmarking ES with Rally. I'm following documentation on running a benchmark with rally.

Here is how I run the **esrally** command.

```
[elasticsearch@fedoravm ~]$ esrally --pipeline=from-distribution --distribution-version=5.0.0-alpha1

```

Here is the output on the command line:

```
    ________
   / __\____ _/ / /_ __
  / /_/ / __ `/ / / / / /
 / _, _/ /_/ / / / /_/ /
/_/ |_|\ __,_/_/_/\__ , /
            / ____ /

Writing additional logs to /home/elasticsearch/.rally/benchmarks/races/2016-09-30-15-35-01/local/logs/rally_out.log

Downloading Elasticsearch 5.0.0-alpha1 ...
Cloning into '/home/elasticsearch/.rally/benchmarks/tracks/default'...
remote: Counting objects: 370, done.
remote: Total 370 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 370
Receiving objects: 100% (370/370), 59.41 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (262/262), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
Downloading data from http://benchmarks.elasticsearch.org.s3.amazonaws.com/corpora/geonames/documents.json.bz2 (189 MB) ... Done
Decompressing /home/elasticsearch/.rally/benchmarks/data/geonames/documents.json.bz2 (resulting size: 2.60 GB) ... Done
Racing on track [geonames] and challenge [append-no-conflicts] with car [defaults]
Rally will wipe the benchmark candidate directory [/home/elasticsearch/.rally/benchmarks/races/2016-09-30-15-35-01/local/tracks/geonames/append-no-conflicts/install] after the benchmark.

ERROR: Cannot race

Reason: This race ended early with a fatal crash. For details please see the logs.

Please check the log file [/home/elasticsearch/.rally/benchmarks/races/2016-09-30-15-35-01/local/logs/rally_out.log] for further details first.

If you need further help, please check Rally's docs at https://esrally.readthedocs.io or ask a question in the forum at https://discuss.elastic.co/c/rally.

If you think this is a bug, please file a report at https://github.com/elastic/rally/issues and include the log file for this race (/home/elasticsearch/.rally/benchmarks/races/2016-09-30-15-35-01/local/logs/rally_out.log).

```

I've checked the **rally\_out.log** , and here are all messages with keyword **error**.

```
[elasticsearch@fedoravm ~]$ grep -i error /data/rally/benchmarks/races/2016-09-30-15-35-01/local/logs/rally_out.log 
2016-09-30 15:41:09,235 rally.launcher INFO rally-node0: ERROR: Elasticsearch settings must be prefixed with [es.] but was [node.name]
2016-09-30 15:41:28,798 rally.launcher ERROR Could not start node 'rally-node0' within timeout period of 20.0 seconds.
2016-09-30 15:41:28,798 root ERROR Cannot run subcommand [race].
raise exceptions.LaunchError("%s Please check the logs in '%s' for more details." % (msg, log_dir))
esrally.exceptions.LaunchError: Could not start node 'rally-node0' within timeout period of 20.0 seconds. Please check the logs in '/home/elasticsearch/.rally/benchmarks/races/2016-09-30-15-35-01/local/logs' for more details.
raise exceptions.RallyError("This race ended early with a fatal crash. For details please see the logs.").with_traceback(tb)
raise exceptions.LaunchError("%s Please check the logs in '%s' for more details." % (msg, log_dir))
esrally.exceptions.RallyError: This race ended early with a fatal crash. For details please see the logs.

```

Lastly, here is my **rally.ini** file:

```
elasticsearch@fedoravm ~]$ cat /data/rally/rally.ini 
[meta]
config.version = 6

[system]
root.dir = /home/elasticsearch/.rally/benchmarks
log.root.dir = logs
env.name = local

[source]
local.src.dir = /home/elasticsearch/.rally/benchmarks/src
remote.repo.url = https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch.git

[build]
gradle.bin = /usr/bin/gradle

[provisioning]
local.install.dir = install

[runtime]
java8.home = /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.8.0-openjdk-1.8.0.77-1.b03.fc23.x86_64

[benchmarks]
local.dataset.cache = ${system:root.dir}/data

[reporting]
datastore.type = in-memory
datastore.host = 
datastore.port = 
datastore.secure = 
datastore.user = 
datastore.password = 

[tracks]
default.url = https://github.com/elastic/rally-tracks

[defaults]
preserve_benchmark_candidate = False

```

I'd appreciate any help to troubleshoot this.  
Uncas

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![danielmitterdorfer](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/danielmitterdorfer/32/110510_2.png) [@danielmitterdorfer](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/danielmitterdorfer)\
**Post date:** [October 4, 2016, 9:19am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/problem-running-my-first-benchmark-with-esrally-rally-launcher-cannot-start-node/61942/2 "2016-10-04T09:19:30Z")

</div>

Hi @uncas,

I've recently removed support for earlier Alpha versions of Elasticsearch. If you try with later alpha builds of Elasticsearch everything should work fine. E.g.:

> esrally --pipeline=from-distribution --distribution-version=5.0.0-alpha5

Daniel

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![uncas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/e8c25b/32.png) [@uncas](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/uncas)\
**Post date:** [October 4, 2016, 2:27pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/problem-running-my-first-benchmark-with-esrally-rally-launcher-cannot-start-node/61942/3 "2016-10-04T14:27:31Z")

</div>

Thank you Daniel. I will try that today, and will post results.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![uncas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/e8c25b/32.png) [@uncas](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/uncas)\
**Post date:** [October 4, 2016, 7:20pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/problem-running-my-first-benchmark-with-esrally-rally-launcher-cannot-start-node/61942/4 "2016-10-04T19:20:59Z")

</div>

Worked!

Thank you.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![danielmitterdorfer](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/danielmitterdorfer/32/110510_2.png) [@danielmitterdorfer](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/danielmitterdorfer)\
**Post date:** [October 5, 2016, 6:40am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/problem-running-my-first-benchmark-with-esrally-rally-launcher-cannot-start-node/61942/5 "2016-10-05T06:40:00Z")

</div>

Great! You're welcome.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [July 5, 2017, 10:14pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/problem-running-my-first-benchmark-with-esrally-rally-launcher-cannot-start-node/61942/6 "2017-07-05T22:14:55Z")

</div>