WARNING: Version 2.4 of Elasticsearch has passed its EOL date.

This documentation is no longer being maintained and may be removed. If you are running this version, we strongly advise you to upgrade. For the latest information, see the current release documentation.

« Mapper Similarity module »
Elastic Docs ›Elasticsearch Guide [2.4] ›Index Modules

Merge

edit

Merge

edit

A shard in elasticsearch is a Lucene index, and a Lucene index is broken down into segments. Segments are internal storage elements in the index where the index data is stored, and are immutable. Smaller segments are periodically merged into larger segments to keep the index size at bay and to expunge deletes.

The merge process uses auto-throttling to balance the use of hardware resources between merging and other activities like search.

Merge scheduling

edit

The merge scheduler (ConcurrentMergeScheduler) controls the execution of merge operations when they are needed. Merges run in separate threads, and when the maximum number of threads is reached, further merges will wait until a merge thread becomes available.

The merge scheduler supports the following dynamic setting:

index.merge.scheduler.max_thread_count
The maximum number of threads that may be merging at once. Defaults to Math.max(1, Math.min(4, Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors() / 2)) which works well for a good solid-state-disk (SSD). If your index is on spinning platter drives instead, decrease this to 1.
« Mapper Similarity module »