Environment
.Net 5
Elasticsearch.Net.Aws 7.1.0
Problem
Even with pagination, Elasticsearch's query API does not support more than 10_000 records by default. I.e. if the sum of from and size > 10_000 the API throws an error.
Potential solutions
Increase size
I can increase the index's max_result_window as described here. However I am expecting a large dataset in production - probably less than 10_000_000 records at one time, but for obvious reasons I don't believe that simply increasing the window size is a good idea. My use-case does not require over-the-top performance, but it has to be reasonable for both the end-user and the AWS bill.
What do you think? What leeway do I have regarding to max_result_window setting?
Track total hits
I've read about track_total_hits parameter - It only returns the correct amount of total hits on each request, but still does not allow records after the 10_000th to be fetched
Scroll API
I've read about the Scroll-API - it's being deprecated currently, so I'd like to avoid it.
Search after
I've read about the search_after parameter - the concept is to define a consistent sort criteria and call exact query for each page, the only difference being is the value of search_after, which for every subsequent search should be the sort value returned of the last hit in the previous search.
As far as I can tell this is the recommended solution, but while it may work for large page sizes, I'm having difficulty understanding how it solves the basic paging case:
Lets say we have 20_000 records total, page size is 10, hense 2_000 pages. How can I return the last page, containing records 19_990-20_000? Unless I misunderstand, search_after does not help, because I've skipped pages and I don't have the sort value of record number 19_989.
Further more, per the docs:
If provided, the from argument must be 0 (default) or -1
This means that I cannot use a combination of both:
Perform one search with "from": "990"
Use the last record's sort value to perform a second search, again using a "from": "990"
Return the results of the second search.
Beyond that I cannot figure out another way to use it. Could you tell me where I'm getting it wrong?
Related
Based on this article - link there are some serious performance implications with having track_total_hits property set to true.
We currently use it to get the number of documents matching after users search. Then user can use pagination to scroll through the results. The number of documents for such a search usually ranges from 10k - 5M.
Example of a user work flow:
User performs a search which matches 150.000 documents
We show him the first 200 results which he can scroll through but we also show him the total number of documents found in the search.
Since we always show the number of document searches and often those numbers can be quite high we need some kind of a way to get that count. I'm not sure but if we almost always perform paginated searches I would assume a lot of the things would be in memory ? Maybe then this actually effects us less then how it's shown in the provided article?
Some kind of an approximation and not an exact count would be ok for us if it would improve performance.
Is there such an option in Elasticsearch where we can get approximated count on search requests ?
There is no option to get an approximate count, but you may want to consider assigning track_total_hits a lower bound instead of true , which is a good compromise from a performance standpoint ( https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/master/search-your-data.html#track-total-hits)
That way, you can show users that there are at least k results - but there could be more.
Also, try using search_after (if you are not using it already) for pagination.
I'm creating an application using Marklogic 8 and the search API. I need to create facets based on MarkLogic defined collections, but instead of the facet count giving a tally of the number of fragments (documents) which contain X number of occurrences of the keyword search performed, I need the facet count to reflect the total number of times the keyword appears in all documents in the collection.
Right now, I'm using search:search() to process the query and return a element with the facet option enabled.
In the MarkLogic documentation, I've been looking at cts:frequency() which says:
"If you want the total frequency instead of the fragment-based frequency (that is, the total number of occurences of the value in the items specified in the cts:query option of the lexicon API), you must specify the item-frequency option to the lexicon API value input to cts:frequency."
But, I can't get that to work.
I've tried running a query like this in query console, but it times out.
cts:element-values(QName("http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0", "TEI"),
"", "item-frequency",
cts:and-query((
fn:collection("KirchlicheDogmatik/volume4/part3"),
cts:word-query("lehre"))))
The issue is probably that you have a range index on <TEI>, which contains the entire document. Range indexes are memory-mapped, so you have essentially forced the complete text contents of your database into memory. It's hard to say exactly what's going on, but it's probably struggling to inspect the values (range indexes are designed for smaller atomic values) and possibly swapping to disk.
MarkLogic has great documentation on its indexing, so I'd recommend starting there for a better understanding on how to use them: https://docs.marklogic.com/guide/concepts/indexing#id_51573
Note that even using the item-frequency option, results (or counts) are not guaranteed to be one-to-one with the "total number of times the keyword appears." It will report the number of "items" matching - in your example it would report on the number of <TEI> elements matching.
The problem of getting an exact count of terms matching a query across the whole database is actually quite hard. To get exact matching values within a document, you would need to use cts:highlight or cts:walk, which requires loading the whole document into memory. That typically works fine for a subset of documents, but ultimately to get an accurate value for the entire database, you would need to load the entire database into memory and process every document.
Nearly any approach to getting a term match count requires some kind of approximation and depends heavily on your markup. For example, if you index <p> (or even better <s>) elements, it would be possible to construct a query that uses indexes to count the number of matching paragraphs (or sentences), but that would still load an incredibly large amount of data into memory and keep it there. This is technically feasible if you are willing to allocate enough memory (and/or enough servers), but it hardly seems worth it.
From the documentation here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn760793.aspx
It says:
totalEstimatedMatches:
The estimated number of news articles that are relevant to the query. Use this number along with the count and offset query parameters to page the results.
However, there are some serious issues.
1.The returned number of results is ALWAYS less than the requested number in the "count" variable. For example, setting a count=100 results in only 75 results.
2.What's more, even skipping the difference and sending another query to the API with an offset (in this example, offset=100), the API returns a new totalEstimatedMatches!! (first query was 70k results, second time was 138)
What is going on here? How do we fully get the totalEstimatedMatches returned from the first query? Or is that a bogus inflated number?
We did some investigation on this issue. Basically, search engine index does not support an accurate estimation of total match, the same behavior could be observed on Bing.com. the 217M results in the screen shot provided in the image tab above which is not very accurate either.
And, news has backend mechanism that any query output should be less than 100. So the total estimated matches number is not used properly in this example. Normally we do not allow user to download too many results of each query in news. The number of documents you could get from certain query actually capped at a certain number, in most of the case it is around 100.
Imagine i have two kind of records: a bucket and an item, where item is contained in a bucket, and bucket may have relatively small amount of items (normally not more than 4, never more than 10). Those records are squashed into one (an item with extra bucket information) and placed inside Elasticsearch.
The task i am trying to solve is to find 500 buckets (at max) with all related items at once by filtered query that relies on item's attributes, and i'm stuck on limiting / offsetting aggregations. How do i perform such kind of task? I see top_hits aggregation which allows me to control size of related items amount, but i can't find a clue how can i control size of returned buckets.
update: okay, i'm terribly stupid. The size parameter of terms aggregation provides me with limiting. Is there any way to perform offset task? I don't need 100% precision and probably won't ever page those results, but anyway i'd like to see this functionality.
I don't think we'll be seeing this feature any time soon, see relevant discussion at GitHub.
Paging is tricky to implement because document counts for terms
aggregations are not exact when shard_size is less than the field
cardinality and sorting on count desc. So weird things may happen like
the first term of the 2nd page having a higher count than the last
element of the first page, etc.
There an interesting approach is mentioned, you could request like top 20 results on 1st page, then on 2nd page you run the same aggregation but exclude those 20 terms you already saw on the previous page and so forth. But this doesn't allow you "random" access to arbitrary page, you must go through pages in-order.
...if you only have a limited number of unique values compared to the
number of matched documents, doing the paging on client-side would be
more efficient. On the other hand, on high-cardinality-fields, your
first approach based on an exclude would probably be better.
I'm working on a simple index containing one million docs with 30 fields each.
a q=: with a very low start value (0 for instance) takes only a few milliseconds (~1 actually)
the higher the start value is, the slowest SolR gets...
start=100000 => 171 ms
start=500000 => 844 ms
start=1000000 => 1274 ms
I'm a bit surprised by this performance degradation, and I'm afraid since the index is supposed to grow over hundred million documents within a few month.
Maybe did I something wrong in the schema? Or is it aenter code here normal behavior, given slicing docs behind the few first hundreds should usually not happen :)
EDIT
Thanks guys for those explanations - I was guessing something like that, however I do prefer be sure that this was not related to the way the schema has been described. So the question solved for me.
Every time you make search query to solr, it collect all the matching documents to the query. Then it skip the document until the start value is reached and then return the results.
Other point to note is that, every time you make the same search query but with higher start value, these documents are also not present in cache, so it might refresh cache as well. (depending on the size and type of cache you have configured)
Pagination naively works by retrieving all the documents up until the cut off point, throwing them away, then fetching enough documents to satisfy the number of documents requested and then returning.
If you're going to deep paging (going far into the dataset) this becomes expensive, and the CursorMark support was implemented (see "Fetching A Large Number of Sorted Results: Cursors") to support near-instant pagination into a large set of documents.
Yonik also has a good blog post about deep pagination in Solr.