[role="xpack"]
[[ilm-freeze]]
=== Freeze

Phases allowed: cold, frozen.

<<frozen-indices, Freezes>> an index to minimize its memory footprint.

IMPORTANT: Freezing an index closes the index and reopens it within the same API call.
This means that for a short time no primaries are allocated.
The cluster will go red until the primaries are allocated.
This limitation might be removed in the future.

[[ilm-freeze-options]]
==== Options

None.

[[ilm-freeze-ex]]
==== Example

[source,console]
--------------------------------------------------
PUT _ilm/policy/my_policy
{
  "policy": {
    "phases": {
      "cold": {
        "actions": {
          "freeze" : { }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}
--------------------------------------------------