# Use rally to compare existing clusters - document a way to run 'short' tests
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/use-rally-to-compare-existing-clusters-document-a-way-to-run-short-tests/264452
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Tags:** rally
**Created:** [February 16, 2021, 3:31pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/use-rally-to-compare-existing-clusters-document-a-way-to-run-short-tests/264452 "2021-02-16T15:31:33Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@arthurlogilab](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/arthurlogilab)
#### Post date: [February 16, 2021, 3:31pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/use-rally-to-compare-existing-clusters-document-a-way-to-run-short-tests/264452/1 "2021-02-16T15:31:33Z")
I'm a bit new to rally and have been recently trying it out. My goal is to start comparing the performance of two elasticsearch clusters I have access to (classic "old one", new "on kubernetes one"). I was hoping to have a rather "quick" test suite and end up having a performance rating which we can use to measure the performances improvements of tweaking some things on the new "on kubernetes cluster".
The useful bit of the documentation for this was :
[https://esrally.readthedocs.io/en/stable/recipes.html?highlight=--pipeline%3Dbenchmark-only#benchmarking-an-existing-cluster](https://esrally.readthedocs.io/en/stable/recipes.html?highlight=--pipeline%3Dbenchmark-only#benchmarking-an-existing-cluster)
Running on my laptop I tried a simple `docker run --rm -ti --name elasticsearch -p 9200:9200 -p 9300:9300 -e "discovery.type=single-node" elasticsearch:7.10.1` and `esrally race --pipeline=benchmark-only --target-hosts=localhost:9200 `, this seemed to be a rather long tests, so I tried to dig for a smaller dataset. After some tweaking I got to using :
```auto
esrally race --pipeline=benchmark-only --target-hosts=localhost:9200 --track=percolator --include-tasks=delete-index,create-index,index,percolator_with_content_google --kill-running-processes
```
Which seems to give me some performance numbers in 69 seconds, 🎉
Am I doing it right ? Could this be put forward in the documentation as "Quickstart, get some raw numbers out without waiting too long" ?
---
### Author:  [@Evgenia\_Badiyanova](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Evgenia_Badiyanova)
#### Post date: [February 17, 2021, 5:31pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/use-rally-to-compare-existing-clusters-document-a-way-to-run-short-tests/264452/2 "2021-02-17T17:31:18Z")
Hello Arthur,
Thank you for your interest in Rally! In general, each rally track evaluating performance of a particular feature. For example, percolator track is for evaluating the performance of percolation queries. So you might want to pick a track that is close to what the actual workload will be. `esrally list tracks` shows short description of the tracks and existing challenges. For more detailed description please take a look README files under each track in [rally-tracks](https://github.com/elastic/rally-tracks)
We do have [--exclude option](https://esrally.readthedocs.io/en/stable/command_line_reference.html?highlight=exclude#exclude-tasks). You could consider running a smaller subset of queries to speed up the test. Also, for each track there often challenges that only test indexing throughput (have `index-only` in the name) and that could be faster (if indexing performance is what you are trying to tune for). However, we don't use indexing throughput numbers for [percolator](https://github.com/elastic/rally-tracks/tree/master/percolator) and [noaa](https://github.com/elastic/rally-tracks/tree/master/noaa) as a metrics.
Also, for some general benchmarking advice you might want to check our blog post [Seven Tips for Better Elasticsearch Benchmarks](https://www.elastic.co/blog/seven-tips-for-better-elasticsearch-benchmarks).
Evgenia
---
### Author:  [@arthurlogilab](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/arthurlogilab)
#### Post date: [February 18, 2021, 11:17am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/use-rally-to-compare-existing-clusters-document-a-way-to-run-short-tests/264452/3 "2021-02-18T11:17:18Z")
Hi @Evgenia_Badiyanova, thanks for your reply.
I understand that there are very specific things to test out using rally and that it is tailored for advanced benchmarks, I might be needing that at some point and it feels like a really good tool for that. Indeed my two "naive" interests in performance would be "what's the performance of indexing" and "what's the performance of simple search" (we used [https://locust.io/](https://locust.io/) at some point for the latter).
Do you think rally could have a track/dataset that gives a quick / summarised answer to a first "impression" (not detailed study) of these metrics, a bit like pgbench [PostgreSQL: Documentation: 13: pgbench](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgbench.html) would for a naive approach to perfomance for postgresql.
This is primarily to have simple ways of communicating with a hosting service or IT department to be able to compare existing and new services or when a cluster characteristic is changed (for example, "hey I've added some RAM, is it working faster?" - "me: launched the rally test, we've gone from X to Y, that's good!")
---
### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2021, 11:18am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/use-rally-to-compare-existing-clusters-document-a-way-to-run-short-tests/264452/4 "2021-03-18T11:18:10Z")
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