Circuit Breaker

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Elasticsearch contains multiple circuit breakers used to prevent operations from causing an OutOfMemoryError. Each breaker specifies a limit for how much memory it can use. Additionally, there is a parent-level breaker that specifies the total amount of memory that can be used across all breakers.

These settings can be dynamically updated on a live cluster with the cluster-update-settings API.

Parent circuit breaker

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The parent-level breaker can be configured with the following setting:

indices.breaker.total.limit
Starting limit for overall parent breaker, defaults to 70% of JVM heap.

Field data circuit breaker

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The field data circuit breaker allows Elasticsearch to estimate the amount of memory a field will require to be loaded into memory. It can then prevent the field data loading by raising an exception. By default the limit is configured to 60% of the maximum JVM heap. It can be configured with the following parameters:

indices.breaker.fielddata.limit
Limit for fielddata breaker, defaults to 60% of JVM heap
indices.breaker.fielddata.overhead
A constant that all field data estimations are multiplied with to determine a final estimation. Defaults to 1.03

Request circuit breaker

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The request circuit breaker allows Elasticsearch to prevent per-request data structures (for example, memory used for calculating aggregations during a request) from exceeding a certain amount of memory.

indices.breaker.request.limit
Limit for request breaker, defaults to 60% of JVM heap
indices.breaker.request.overhead
A constant that all request estimations are multiplied with to determine a final estimation. Defaults to 1

In flight requests circuit breaker

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The in flight requests circuit breaker allows Elasticsearch to limit the memory usage of all currently active incoming requests on transport or HTTP level from exceeding a certain amount of memory on a node. The memory usage is based on the content length of the request itself.

network.breaker.inflight_requests.limit
Limit for in flight requests breaker, defaults to 100% of JVM heap. This means that it is bound by the limit configured for the parent circuit breaker.
network.breaker.inflight_requests.overhead
A constant that all in flight requests estimations are multiplied with to determine a final estimation. Defaults to 1

Accounting requests circuit breaker

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The accounting circuit breaker allows Elasticsearch to limit the memory usage of things held in memory that are not released when a request is completed. This includes things like the Lucene segment memory.

indices.breaker.accounting.limit
Limit for accounting breaker, defaults to 100% of JVM heap. This means that it is bound by the limit configured for the parent circuit breaker.
indices.breaker.accounting.overhead
A constant that all accounting estimations are multiplied with to determine a final estimation. Defaults to 1

Script compilation circuit breaker

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Slightly different than the previous memory-based circuit breaker, the script compilation circuit breaker limits the number of inline script compilations within a period of time.

See the "prefer-parameters" section of the scripting documentation for more information.

script.max_compilations_rate
Limit for the number of unique dynamic scripts within a certain interval that are allowed to be compiled. Defaults to 75/5m, meaning 75 every 5 minutes.