When you shut down a node, the allocation process waits for `index.unassigned.node_left.delayed_timeout` (by default, one minute) before starting to replicate the shards on that node to other nodes in the cluster, which can involve a lot of I/O. Since the node is shortly going to be restarted, this I/O is unnecessary. You can avoid racing the clock by <> of replicas before shutting down the node: [source,console] -------------------------------------------------- PUT _cluster/settings { "persistent": { "cluster.routing.allocation.enable": "primaries" } } -------------------------------------------------- // TEST[skip:indexes don't assign]