Getting Data In

When is the BatchReader used and when is the TailingProcessor used?

JeremyHagan
Communicator

I have a UniversalForwarder that is exporting hourly data to a monitored folder. Sometimes there are a lot of records (50,000+) and sometimes there is only a few thousand. I have noticed that when the file is bigger that the BatchReader appears to process the file and when the file is smaller the TailingProcessor processes the file.

Is there a limit to this that can be set?

0 Karma

gkanapathy
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

The batch reader is used when the file is over 20 mb in size. Otherwise, the regular tailing processor queue is used. The batch reader only processes one file at a time, while the tailing processor can do many. The limit exists to prevent a bunch of large files for using up all slots and starving out new smaller files.

The threshold can be changed in limits.conf:

min_batch_size_bytes = 10485760

to set it to 10 MB, for example.

dm1
Builder

Is this documented somewhere in Splunk official documentation ?

Got questions? Get answers!

Join the Splunk Community Slack to learn, troubleshoot, and make connections with fellow Splunk practitioners in real time!

Meet up IRL or virtually!

Join Splunk User Groups to connect and learn in-person by region or remotely by topic or industry.

Get Updates on the Splunk Community!

Data Management Digest – September 2026

    Welcome to the September 2026 edition of Data Management Digest! September brought a fresh wave of ...

Federated Search for CloudWatch Unified Data Store Is Generally Available

As organizations modernize their cloud environments, AWS workloads generate more security, operational, and ...

Announcing Modern Navigation: A New Era of Splunk User Experience

We are excited to introduce the Modern Navigation feature in the Splunk Platform, available to both cloud and ...