Fastest way to get data into flume?

[Chris Schneider <ch...@christopher-schneider.com>]

I have a fair bit of data continually being created in the form of smallish
messages (a few hundred bytes), which needs to enter flume, and eventually
sink into HDFS.

I need to be sure that the data lands in persistent storage and won't be
lost, but otherwise throughput isn't important. It just needs to be fast
enough to not back up.

I'm running into a bottleneck in the initial ingestion of data.

I've tried the netcat source, and the thrift source but both have capped
out at a thousand or so records per second.

Batching up the thrift api items into sets of 10 and using appendBatch is a
pretty large speedup, but still not enough.

Here's a gist of my ruby test script, and some example runs, and my config.

https://gist.github.com/cschneid/9792305


1.  Are there any obvious performance changes I can do to speed up
ingestion?
2. How fast can flume reasonably go? Should I switch my source to be
something else that's faster? What?
3. Is there a better tool for this kind of task? (rapid, safe ingestion
small messages).

Thanks!
Chris