Improving memory allocation with Libbeat output client and Elasticsearch

Alexandros Sapranidis discusses efforts to enhance memory allocation and performance when publishing events from Filebeat or other beats to Elasticsearch, focusing on optimizing the publishEvent function responsible for sending bulk requests and parsing responses. By analyzing memory allocation patterns through benchmarks and addressing deprecated functions, the team improved memory efficiency by replacing io.ReadAll with io.copy, reducing response sizes using Elasticsearch's Response Filtering, and reusing buffers, which collectively decreased memory allocation by 43% and execution time and CPU cycles. These improvements were implemented in Beats version 8.11.0 and influenced changes in the Logstash Elasticsearch output plugin. The investigation underscores the importance of addressing deprecated warnings and optimizing response sizes for applications handling large data volumes to enhance performance and resource allocation.