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Elastic Docs ›Elasticsearch Reference [5.6] ›Search APIs ›Profile API

Profiling Aggregations

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Profiling Aggregations

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aggregations Section

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The aggregations section contains detailed timing of the aggregation tree executed by a particular shard. The overall structure of this aggregation tree will resemble your original Elasticsearch request. Let’s consider the following example aggregations request:

GET /house-prices/_search
{
  "profile": true,
  "size": 0,
  "aggs": {
    "property_type": {
      "terms": {
        "field": "propertyType"
      },
      "aggs": {
        "avg_price": {
          "avg": {
            "field": "price"
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Which yields the following aggregation profile output

"aggregations": [
  {
    "type": "org.elasticsearch.search.aggregations.bucket.terms.GlobalOrdinalsStringTermsAggregator",
    "description": "property_type",
    "time": "4280.456978ms",
    "time_in_nanos": "4280456978",
    "breakdown": {
      "reduce": 0,
      "reduce_count": 0,
      "build_aggregation": 49765,
      "build_aggregation_count": 300,
      "initialise": 52785,
      "initialize_count": 300,
      "collect": 3155490036,
      "collect_count": 1800
    },
    "children": [
      {
        "type": "org.elasticsearch.search.aggregations.metrics.avg.AvgAggregator",
        "description": "avg_price",
        "time": "1124.864392ms",
        "time_in_nanos": "1124864392",
        "breakdown": {
          "reduce": 0,
          "reduce_count": 0,
          "build_aggregation": 1394,
          "build_aggregation_count": 150,
          "initialise": 2883,
          "initialize_count": 150,
          "collect": 1124860115,
          "collect_count": 900
        }
      }
    ]
  }
]

From the profile structure we can see our property_type terms aggregation which is internally represented by the GlobalOrdinalsStringTermsAggregator class and the sub aggregator avg_price which is internally represented by the AvgAggregator class. The type field displays the class used internally to represent the aggregation. The description field displays the name of the aggregation.

The time field shows that it took ~4 seconds for the entire aggregation to execute. The recorded time is inclusive of all children.

The breakdown field will give detailed stats about how the time was spent, we’ll look at that in a moment. Finally, the children array lists any sub-aggregations that may be present. Because we have an avg_price aggregation as a sub-aggregation to the property_type aggregation we see it listed as a child of the property_type aggregation. the two aggregation outputs have identical information (type, time, breakdown, etc). Children are allowed to have their own children.

Timing Breakdown

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The breakdown component lists detailed timing statistics about low-level Lucene execution:

"breakdown": {
  "reduce": 0,
  "reduce_count": 0,
  "build_aggregation": 49765,
  "build_aggregation_count": 300,
  "initialise": 52785,
  "initialize_count": 300,
  "collect": 3155490036,
  "collect_count": 1800
}

Timings are listed in wall-clock nanoseconds and are not normalized at all. All caveats about the overall time apply here. The intention of the breakdown is to give you a feel for A) what machinery in Elasticsearch is actually eating time, and B) the magnitude of differences in times between the various components. Like the overall time, the breakdown is inclusive of all children times.

The meaning of the stats are as follows:

All parameters:

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initialise

This times how long it takes to create and initialise the aggregation before starting to collect documents.

collect

This represents the cumulative time spent in the collect phase of the aggregation. This is where matching documents are passed to the aggregation and the state of the aggregator is updated based on the information contained in the documents.

build_aggregation

This represents the time spent creating the shard level results of the aggregation ready to pass back to the reducing node after the collection of documents is finished.

reduce

This is not currently used and will always report 0. Currently aggregation profiling only times the shard level parts of the aggregation execution. Timing of the reduce phase will be added later.

*_count

Records the number of invocations of the particular method. For example, "collect_count": 2, means the collect() method was called on two different documents.

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