normcat

normcat

normcat will read a file (or stdin) and print it to stdout with a variable rate following a normal distribution (configurable).

When it reads from a file, it can cycle, so when it reaches the end of the file, it will start over again, for almost infinite output.

It can understand files compressed with xz, gzip and lz4 and uncompresses automatically on the fly.

Why? Because I needed to create a couple demos with streaming data. For example in the graph below, there are 3 normcat instances piping data to a kafka producer:

Normcat memory usage depends on the average line size. By default normcat will try to buffer 64*1024 entries (lines of input) into memory. If you prefer lower memory (buffer just 1024 entries) build with:

go build -tags lowmem

GPLv3 License.