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Shadow replica indices
editShadow replica indices
editDeprecated in 5.2.0.
Shadow replicas don’t see much usage and we are planning to remove them
If you would like to use a shared filesystem, you can use the shadow replicas settings to choose where on disk the data for an index should be kept, as well as how Elasticsearch should replay operations on all the replica shards of an index.
In order to fully utilize the index.data_path
and index.shadow_replicas
settings, you need to allow Elasticsearch to use the same data directory for
multiple instances by setting node.add_lock_id_to_custom_path
to false in
elasticsearch.yml:
node.add_lock_id_to_custom_path: false
You will also need to indicate to the security manager where the custom indices
will be, so that the correct permissions can be applied. You can do this by
setting the path.shared_data
setting in elasticsearch.yml:
path.shared_data: /opt/data
This means that Elasticsearch can read and write to files in any subdirectory of
the path.shared_data
setting.
You can then create an index with a custom data path, where each node will use this path for the data:
Because shadow replicas do not index the document on replica shards, it’s possible for the replica’s known mapping to be behind the index’s known mapping if the latest cluster state has not yet been processed on the node containing the replica. Because of this, it is highly recommended to use pre-defined mappings when using shadow replicas.
PUT /my_index { "index" : { "number_of_shards" : 1, "number_of_replicas" : 4, "data_path": "/opt/data/my_index", "shadow_replicas": true } }
In the above example, the "/opt/data/my_index" path is a shared filesystem that
must be available on every node in the Elasticsearch cluster. You must also
ensure that the Elasticsearch process has the correct permissions to read from
and write to the directory used in the index.data_path
setting.
The data_path
does not have to contain the index name, in this case,
"my_index" was used but it could easily also have been "/opt/data/"
An index that has been created with the index.shadow_replicas
setting set to
"true" will not replicate document operations to any of the replica shards,
instead, it will only continually refresh. Once segments are available on the
filesystem where the shadow replica resides (after an Elasticsearch "flush"), a
regular refresh (governed by the index.refresh_interval
) can be used to make
the new data searchable.
Since documents are only indexed on the primary shard, realtime GET
requests could fail to return a document if executed on the replica shard,
therefore, GET API requests automatically have the ?preference=_primary
flag
set if there is no preference flag already set.
In order to ensure the data is being synchronized in a fast enough manner, you may need to tune the flush threshold for the index to a desired number. A flush is needed to fsync segment files to disk, so they will be visible to all other replica nodes. Users should test what flush threshold levels they are comfortable with, as increased flushing can impact indexing performance.
The Elasticsearch cluster will still detect the loss of a primary shard, and
transform the replica into a primary in this situation. This transformation will
take slightly longer, since no IndexWriter
is maintained for each shadow
replica.
Below is the list of settings that can be changed using the update settings API:
-
index.data_path
(string) - Path to use for the index’s data. Note that by default Elasticsearch will append the node ordinal by default to the path to ensure multiple instances of Elasticsearch on the same machine do not share a data directory.
-
index.shadow_replicas
-
Boolean value indicating this index should use shadow replicas. Defaults to
false
. -
index.shared_filesystem
-
Boolean value indicating this index uses a shared filesystem. Defaults to
the
true
ifindex.shadow_replicas
is set to true,false
otherwise. -
index.shared_filesystem.recover_on_any_node
-
Boolean value indicating whether the primary shards for the index should be
allowed to recover on any node in the cluster. If a node holding a copy of
the shard is found, recovery prefers that node. Defaults to
false
.