Currently Filebeat seems to push data to Logstash at the rate it can tail a file. For users where the rate of log generation is variable this can result in high bandwidth utilization - sometimes unacceptably high.

This ticket proposes introducing a max_bytes_per_second setting in the beats protocol to Logstash. If the log files being followed are written at a greater rate than this setting value, Filebeat will throttle the rate at which it tails the log file - potentially resulting in it "falling behind" . In this case periods of lower activity would be used to catch up.

Discussion required as to how this would impact other beats. It may be more appropriate for this to be a Filebeat specific setting e.g. max_read_bytes_per_second.