https://discuss.elastic.co/t/logstash-not-showing-any-output-solved/28636/16
By default Logstash will tail files. With start_position => beginning
it will indeed read files from the beginning but only files that it hasn't seen before. I'm guessing that Logstash for some reason thinks it has seen and processed your perflog.csv and that it's now waiting for additional data to be appended to it. A recent pull request335 adds more documentation about how the file input plugin works, including information about how to reset the state information that Logstash keeps so that it actually starts from the beginning.
Thanks. I found a couple of ~/.sincedb*
files and removed them. When I reran logstash there is still no output.