ElasticSearch indexing with hundreds of indices - elasticsearch

I have the following scenario:
More than 100 million items and counting (10 million added each month).
8 Elastic servers
12 Shards for our one index
Until now, all of those items were indexed in the same index (under different types). In order to improve the environment, we decided to index items by geohash code when our mantra was - not more than 30GB per shard.
The current status is that we have more than 1500 indices, 12 shards per index, and every item will be inserted into one of those indices. The number of shards surpassed 20000 as you can understand....
Our indices are in the format <Base_Index_Name>_<geohash>
My question is raised due to performance problems which made me question our method. Simple count query in the format of GET */_count
takes seconds!
If my intentions is to question many indices, is this implementation bad? How many indices should a cluster with 8 virtual servers have? How many shards? We have a lot of data and growing fast.

Actually it is depends on your usage. Query to all of the indices takes long time because query should go to all of the shards and results should be merged afterwards. 20K shard is not an easy task to query.
If your data is time based , I would advise to add month or date information to the index name and change your query to GET indexname201602/search or GET *201602.
That way you can drastically reduce the number of shards that your query executes and it will take much less time

Related

Elasticsearch index by date search performance - to split or not to split

I am currently playing around with Elasticsearch (ES). We are ingesting sensor data and for 3 years we have approximately 1,000,000,000 documents in one index, making the index about 50GB in size. Indexing performance is not that important as new data only arrives every 15 minutes per sensor on average, therefore I want to focus on searching and aggregating performance. We are running a front-end showing basically a dashboard about average values from last week compared to one year before etc.
I am using ES on AWS and after performance on one machine was quite slow, I spun up a cluster with 3 data nodes (each 2 cores, 8 GB mem), and gave the index 3 primary shards and one replica. Throwing computing power at the data certainly improved the situation and more power would help more, but my question is:
Would splitting the index for example by month increase the performance? Or being more specific: is querying (esp. by date) a smaller index faster if I adjust the queries adequatly, or does ES already 'know' where to find specific dates in a shard?
(I know about other benefits of having smaller indices, like being able to roll over and keep only a specific time interval, etc.)
1/ Elasticsearch only knows where to find a specific date in an index if your index is sorted by your date field. You can check the documentation here.
In your use case, it can improve drastically search performance. And since all the data will be added at the "end of the index" since its date sorted, you should not see much of indexation overhead.
2/ Without index sort, smaller time-bounded indices will work better (even if you target all your indices) since it will often allow a rewrite or your range query to a match_all / match_none internal query.
For more information about this behavior you should read this blog post :
Instant Aggregations: Rewriting Queries for Fun and Profit

Elasticsearch- Single Index vs Multiple Indexes

I have more than 4000 different fields in one of my index. And that number can grow larger with time.
As Elasticsearch give default limit of 1000 field per index. There must be some reason.
Now, I am thinking that I should not increase the limit set by Elasticsearch.
So I should break my single large index into small multiple indexes.
Before moving to multiple indexes I have few questions as follows:
The number of small multiple indexes can increase up to 50. So searching on all 50 index at a time would slow down search time as compared to a search on the single large index?
Is there really a need to break my single large index into multiple indexes because of a large number of fields?
When I use small multiple indexes, the total number of shards would increase drastically(more than 250 shards). Each index would have 5 shards(default number, which I don't want to change). Search on these multiple indexes would be searching on these 250 shards at once. Will this affect my search performance? Note: These shards might increase in time as well.
When I use Single large index which contains only 5 shards and a large number of documents, won't this be an overload on these 5 shards?
It strongly depends on your infrastructure. If you run a single node with 50 Shards a query will run longer than it would with only 1 Shard. If you have 50 Nodes holding one shard each, it will most likely run faster than one node with 1 Shard (if you have a big dataset). In the end, you have to test with real data to be sure.
When there is a massive amount of fields, ES gets a performance problem and errors are more likely. The main problem is that every field has to be stored in the cluster state, which takes a toll on your master node(s). Also, in a lot of cases you have to work with lots of sparse data (90% of fields empty).
As a rule of thumb, one shard should contain between 30 GB and 50 GB of data. I would not worry too much about overloading shards in your use-case. The opposite is true.
I suggest testing your use-case with less shards, go down to 1 Shard, 1 Replica for your index. The overhead from searching multiple Shards (5 primary, multiply by replicas) then combining the results again is massive in comparison to your small dataset.
Keep in mind that document_type behaviour changed and will change further. Since 6.X you can only have one document_type per Index, starting in 7.X document_type is removed entirely. As the API listens at _doc, _doc is the suggested document_type to use in 6.X. Either move to one Index per _type or introduce a new field that stores your type if you need the data in one index.

Tradeoffs between large and small indexes on Elasticsearch

Generally speaking, which are the tradeoffs (in terms of performance and memory usage) between large and small indexes in Elasticsearch?
Elaborating a little:
Consider a cluster with 8 nodes, each node with 1 shard and 30Gb allocated to the JVM.
Consider also a scenario with 50 million of documents per day (all with the same structure and using doc-values), retained for 90 days. Each day of documents has about 35Gb on disk.
I want to run some queries in these cluster, covering a total of 12 hours of data.
These queries are composed by some nested aggregations: a date-histogram, followed by a cardinality and a percentile aggregation.
Considering the amount of data, which is better: use daily-indexes or only a single index?
PS: I know that is a "vague" question. My question is more theoretical.
I want to understand better what occur during an aggregation and how this relates to the number of indexes.

Elasticsearch performance index with alias

I'd like to use Elasticsearch and i think it is a good idea to set an Index like that: . I want to use one shard per index and to make a query over all years I made an alias and put all new Index for every month per costumer into it.
I just use one shard per index because they data per month could be between ~ 1GB to 10-50+ GB.
My question: Is my planing good or is it bad? any recommendation?
For example I collect data over 2 years and search with an alias , ES has to go through 24 Indexes. Does this make any performance problems? I could index per year but then i need to make more shards per costumer and some of them could be very small (to many shards for just a few GB) and others will be very big (e.g. 10 shards and over 50 GB per Shard, the index is very big).
Thanks in advance!

Should I control the Index size in Elastic Search?

I have a fast growing database and I'm using Elastic Search to manage it.it has only one index and gets 200 K new documents per day. each document contains of about 5 KB text.
Should I keep using only one index or it's better to have one index for each day or something else?
If so, what's the benefits of having multiple indices?
You should definitely worry about the maximum size of your shards/index. We use daily indexes for stuff where we are inserting millions of records per day and monthly indexes where were are inserting millions per month.
A good rule of thumb is that shards should max out around 4 GB (remember there are a configurable number of shards per index).
The advantage is that when you have daily/weekly/monthly indexes, you can eventually close/delete them when your cluster becomes too big or the data isn't useful anymore. If your data is time series data, you can craft your queries to only hit the indexes that are used for the given data. Also if you've made a mistake in how many shards you really need, you can correct it going forward (because you create a new index periodically).
The disadvantage is then that you have to manage all of the extra indexes, but there are tools to do that (elasticsearch-curator for example).

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