Performance

Performance for Batsd is typically comparable with Graphite performance with similar hardware and data volumes. 37signals has been using Batsd with well in excess of 10,000 incoming observations per second with minimal load on midrange server hardware with SSDs.

Ruby version

Ruby 1.9.3 or JRuby 1.6 or later is required.

Batsd makes heavy use of threadpools to defer blocking disk and network operations. Because of this, JRuby is the prefered Ruby version to run, preferably on Java version 1.7 to capture the full performance potential.

For high volumes of data, the maximum heap and stack size for the JVM will likely need to be raised, eg., by setting JAVA_OPTS=-Xmx2G -Xms2G -Xmn512m. Performance can be improved by deferring garbage collection further with greater JVM limits.

Disk

In almost every case, disk performance will be the bottleneck limiting performance. While you can use consumer HDDs or even a network attached storage device exposed via NFS, a RAID array of SSDs will offer the best performance.

Redis

Redis is unlikely to be a performance limitation, though a localhost instance will offer the best performance. Advice on optimizing Redis further can be obtained from the Redis website.