# Lightweight Benchmarking Tool for Apache Cassandra
**Runs custom CQL workloads against a Cassandra cluster and measures throughput and response times**
## Why Yet Another Benchmarking Program?
- Latte outperforms other benchmarking tools for Apache Cassandra by a wide margin. See [benchmarks](BENCHMARKS.md).
- Latte aims to offer the most flexible way of defining workloads.
### Performance
Contrary to
[NoSQLBench](https://github.com/nosqlbench/nosqlbench),
[Cassandra Stress](https://cassandra.apache.org/doc/4.0/cassandra/tools/cassandra_stress.html)
and [tlp-stress](https://thelastpickle.com/tlp-stress/),
Latte has been written in Rust and uses the native Cassandra driver from Scylla.
It features a fully asynchronous, thread-per-core execution engine,
capable of running thousands of requests per second from a single thread.
Latte has the following unique performance characteristics:
* Great scalability on multi-core machines.
* About 10x better CPU efficiency than NoSQLBench.
This means you can test large clusters with a small number of clients.
* About 50x-100x lower memory footprint than Java-based tools.
* Very low impact on operating system resources – low number of syscalls, context switches and page faults.
* No client code warmup needed. The client code works with maximum performance from the first benchmark cycle.
Even runs as short as 30 seconds give accurate results.
* No GC pauses nor HotSpot recompilation happening in the middle of the test. You want to measure hiccups of the server,
not the benchmarking tool.
The excellent performance makes it a perfect tool for exploratory benchmarking, when you quickly want to experiment with
different workloads.
### Flexibility
Other benchmarking tools often use configuration files to specify workload recipes.
Although that makes it easy to define simple workloads, it quickly becomes cumbersome when you want
to script more realistic scenarios that issue multiple
queries or need to generate data in different ways than the ones directly built into the tool.
Instead of trying to bend a popular configuration file format into a turing-complete scripting language, Latte simply
embeds a real, fully-featured, turing-complete, modern scripting language. We chose [Rune](https://rune-rs.github.io/)
due to painless integration with Rust, first-class async support, satisfying performance and great support from its
maintainers.
Rune offers syntax and features similar to Rust, albeit with dynamic typing and easy automatic memory management. Hence,
you can not only just issue custom CQL queries, but you can program
anything you wish. There are variables, conditional statements, loops, pattern matching, functions, lambdas,
user-defined data structures, objects, enums, constants, macros and many more.
## Features
* Compatible with Apache Cassandra 3.x, 4.x, DataStax Enterprise 6.x and ScyllaDB
* Custom workloads with a powerful scripting engine
* Asynchronous queries
* Prepared queries
* Programmable data generation
* Workload parameterization
* Accurate measurement of throughput and response times with error margins
* No coordinated omission
* Configurable number of connections and threads
* Rate and concurrency limiters
* Progress bars
* Beautiful text reports
* Can dump report in JSON
* Side-by-side comparison of two runs
* Statistical significance analysis of differences corrected for auto-correlation
## Limitations
Latte is still early stage software under intensive development.
* Binding some CQL data types is not yet supported, e.g. user defined types, maps or integer types smaller than 64-bit.
* Query result sets are not exposed yet.
* The set of data generating functions is tiny and will be extended soon.
* Backwards compatibility may be broken frequently.
## Installation
### From deb package
```shell
dpkg -i latte-<version>.deb
````
## From source
1. [Install Rust toolchain](https://rustup.rs/)
2. Run `cargo install latte-cli`
## Usage
Start a Cassandra cluster somewhere (can be a local node). Then run:
```shell
latte schema <workload.rn> [<node address>] # create the database schema
latte load <workload.rn> [<node address>] # populate the database with data
latte run <workload.rn> [-f <function>] [<node address>] # execute the workload and measure the performance
```
You can find a few example workload files in the `workloads` folder.
For convenience, you can place workload files under `/usr/share/latte/workloads` or `.local/share/latte/workloads`,
so latte can find them regardless of the current working directory. You can also set up custom workload locations
by setting `LATTE_WORKLOAD_PATH` environment variable.
Latte produces text reports on stdout but also saves all data to a json file in the working directory. The name of the
file is created automatically from the parameters of the run and a timestamp.
You can display the results of a previous run with `latte show`:
```shell
latte show <report.json>
latte show <report.json> -b <previous report.json> # to compare against baseline performance
```
Run `latte --help` to display help with the available options.
## Workloads
Workloads for Latte are fully customizable with embedded scripting language [Rune](https://rune-rs.github.io/).
A workload script defines a set of public functions that Latte calls automatically. A minimum viable workload script
must define at least a single public async function `run` with two arguments:
- `ctx` – session context that provides the access to Cassandra
- `i` – current unique cycle number of a 64-bit integer type, starting at 0
The following script would benchmark querying the `system.local` table:
```rust
pub async fn run(ctx, i) {
ctx.execute("SELECT cluster_name FROM system.local LIMIT 1").await
}
```
Instance functions on `ctx` are asynchronous, so you should call `await` on them.
The workload script can provide more than one function for running the benchmark.
In this case you can name those functions whatever you like, and then select one of them
with `-f` / `--function` parameter.
### Schema creation
You can (re)create your own keyspaces and tables needed by the benchmark in the `schema` function.
The `schema` function should also drop the old schema if present.
The `schema` function is executed by running `latte schema` command.
```rust
pub async fn schema(ctx) {
ctx.execute("CREATE KEYSPACE IF NOT EXISTS test \
WITH REPLICATION = { 'class' : 'SimpleStrategy', 'replication_factor' : 1 }").await?;
ctx.execute("DROP TABLE IF NOT EXISTS test.test").await?;
ctx.execute("CREATE TABLE test.test(id bigint, data varchar)").await?;
}
```
### Prepared statements
Calling `ctx.execute` is not optimal, because it doesn't use prepared statements. You can prepare statements and
register them on the context object in the `prepare`
function:
```rust
const INSERT = "my_insert";
const SELECT = "my_select";
pub async fn prepare(ctx) {
ctx.prepare(INSERT, "INSERT INTO test.test(id, data) VALUES (?, ?)").await?;
ctx.prepare(SELECT, "SELECT * FROM test.test WHERE id = ?").await?;
}
pub async fn run(ctx, i) {
ctx.execute_prepared(SELECT, [i]).await
}
```
Query parameters can be bound and passed by names as well:
```rust
const INSERT = "my_insert";
pub async fn prepare(ctx) {
ctx.prepare(INSERT, "INSERT INTO test.test(id, data) VALUES (:id, :data)").await?;
}
pub async fn run(ctx, i) {
ctx.execute_prepared(INSERT, #{id: 5, data: "foo"}).await
}
```
### Populating the database
Read queries are more interesting when they return non-empty result sets.
To be able to load data into tables with `latte load`, you need to set the number of load cycles on the context object
and define the `load` function:
```rust
pub async fn prepare(ctx) {
ctx.load_cycle_count = 1000000;
}
pub async fn load(ctx, i) {
ctx.execute_prepared(INSERT, [i, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet"]).await
}
```
We also recommend defining the `erase` function to erase the data before loading so that you always get the same
dataset regardless of the data that were present in the database before:
```rust
pub async fn erase(ctx) {
ctx.execute("TRUNCATE TABLE test.test").await
}
```
### Generating data
Latte comes with a library of data generating functions. They are accessible in the `latte` crate. Typically, those
functions accept an integer `i` cycle number, so you can generate consistent numbers. The data generating functions
are pure, i.e. invoking them multiple times with the same parameters yields always the same results.
- `latte::uuid(i)` – generates a random (type 4) UUID
- `latte::hash(i)` – generates a non-negative integer hash value
- `latte::hash2(a, b)` – generates a non-negative integer hash value of two integers
- `latte::hash_range(i, max)` – generates an integer value in range `0..max`
- `latte::hash_select(i, vector)` – selects an item from a vector based on a hash
- `latte::blob(i, len)` – generates a random binary blob of length `len`
- `latte::normal(i, mean, std_dev)` – generates a floating point number from a normal distribution
- `latte::uniform(i, min, max)` – generates a floating point number from a uniform distribution
#### Type conversions
Rune uses 64-bit representation for integers and floats.
Since version 0.28 Rune numbers are automatically converted to proper target query parameter type,
therefore you don't need to do explicit conversions. E.g. you can pass an integer as a parameter
of Cassandra type `smallint`. If the number is too big to fit into the range allowed by the target
type, a runtime error will be signalled.
The following methods are available:
- `x.to_integer()` – converts a float to an integer
- `x.to_float()` – converts an integer to a float
- `x.to_string()` – converts a float or integer to a string
- `x.clamp(min, max)` – restricts the range of an integer or a float value to given range
You can also convert between floats and integers by calling `to_integer` or `to_float` instance functions.
#### Text resources
Text data can be loaded from files or resources with functions in the `fs` module:
- `fs::read_to_string(file_path)` – returns file contents as a string
- `fs::read_lines(file_path)` – reads file lines into a vector of strings
- `fs::read_resource_to_string(resource_name)` – returns builtin resource contents as a string
- `fs::read_resource_lines(resource_name)` – returns builtin resource lines as a vector of strings
The resources are embedded in the program binary. You can find them under `resources` folder in the
source tree.
To reduce the cost of memory allocation, it is best to load resources in the `prepare` function only once
and store them in the `data` field of the context for future use in `load` and `run`:
```rust
pub async fn prepare(ctx) {
ctx.data.last_names = fs::read_lines("lastnames.txt")?;
// ... prepare queries
}
pub async fn run(ctx, i) {
let random_last_name = latte::hash_select(i, ctx.data.last_names);
// ... use random_last_name in queries
}
```
### Parameterizing workloads
Workloads can be parameterized by parameters given from the command line invocation.
Use `latte::param!(param_name, default_value)` macro to initialize script constants from command line parameters:
```rust
const ROW_COUNT = latte::param!("row_count", 1000000);
pub async fn prepare(ctx) {
ctx.load_cycle_count = ROW_COUNT;
}
```
Then you can set the parameter by using `-P`:
```
latte run <workload> -P row_count=200
```
### Error handling
Errors during execution of a workload script are divided into three classes:
- compile errors – the errors detected at the load time of the script; e.g. syntax errors or referencing an undefined
variable. These are signalled immediately and terminate the benchmark even before connecting to the database.
- runtime errors / panics – e.g. division by zero or array out of bounds access. They terminate the benchmark
immediately.
- error return values – e.g. when the query execution returns an error result. Those take effect only when actually
returned from the function (use `?` for propagating them up the call chain). All errors except Cassandra overload
errors terminate
the benchmark immediately. Overload errors (e.g. timeouts) that happen during the main run phase are counted and
reported in the benchmark report.
### Other functions
- `ctx.elapsed_secs()` – returns the number of seconds elapsed since starting the workload, as float