When you shut down a node, the allocation process waits for one minute before starting to replicate the shards on that node to other nodes in the cluster, causing a lot of wasted I/O. You can avoid racing the clock by disabling allocation before shutting down the node: [source,js] -------------------------------------------------- PUT _cluster/settings { "persistent": { "cluster.routing.allocation.enable": "none" } } -------------------------------------------------- // CONSOLE // TEST[skip:indexes don't assign]