What is the benefit of exclusive_route over route?

[tronboto]

We're currently use the route transform in a few places to route between a handful of destinations. Since our conditions are all mutually exclusive, they only ever route to 1 destination, and so I believe these transforms would be good candidates for replacing with exclusive_route. However, I'm just curious what the benefits are? Is the short-circuiting going to be that much quicker or less resource intensive?

[pront]

Full context can be found here: #17040 (comment)

The above explains how the route transform can forward the same event to multiple routes. The exclusive_route will only forward to the first match. You can read more:

• https://vector.dev/highlights/2024-11-07-exclusive_route/
• https://vector.dev/docs/reference/configuration/transforms/exclusive_route/#routing-to-multiple-components

[tronboto]

Thanks, @pront. I understand the reason why you might want this if your conditions aren't mutually exclusive, however, I was wondering if we should expect much performance improvement moving to exclusive_route for mutually exclusive conditions. I guess I can try it and see.

[pront]

Ah yes, it will depend on your pipeline. But the semantics/use cases are different so this was never meant as a performance optimization although it might stop events (you don't need) from proceeding further down the pipeline.

[ChristianCiach]

The exclusive_route will only forward to the first match

This should really be part of the documentation.

Edit: It kinda is in the docs, but hidden inside the "How it works" example:

# Note that the first condition is redundant. The previous route will always have precedence.