[[index-modules-translog]]
== Translog

Changes to Lucene are only persisted to disk during a Lucene commit, which is a
relatively expensive operation and so cannot be performed after every index or
delete operation. Changes that happen after one commit and before another will
be removed from the index by Lucene in the event of process exit or hardware
failure.

Because Lucene commits are too expensive to perform on every individual change,
each shard copy also has a _transaction log_ known as its _translog_ associated
with it. All index and delete operations are written to the translog after
being processed by the internal Lucene index but before they are acknowledged.
In the event of a crash, recent transactions that have been acknowledged but
not yet included in the last Lucene commit can instead be recovered from the
translog when the shard recovers.

An Elasticsearch flush is the process of performing a Lucene commit and
starting a new translog. Flushes are performed automatically in the background
in order to make sure the translog doesn't grow too large, which would make
replaying its operations take a considerable amount of time during recovery.
The ability to perform a flush manually is also exposed through an API,
although this is rarely needed.

[float]
=== Translog settings

The data in the translog is only persisted to disk when the translog is
++fsync++ed and committed.  In the event of a hardware failure or an operating
system crash or a JVM crash or a shard failure, any data written since the
previous translog commit will be lost.

By default, `index.translog.durability` is set to `request` meaning that Elasticsearch will only report success of an index, delete,
update, or bulk request to the client after the translog has been successfully
++fsync++ed and committed on the primary and on every allocated replica. If
`index.translog.durability` is set to `async` then Elasticsearch ++fsync++s
and commits the translog every `index.translog.sync_interval` (defaults to 5 seconds).

The following <<indices-update-settings,dynamically updatable>> per-index
settings control the behaviour of the translog:

`index.translog.sync_interval`::

How often the translog is ++fsync++ed to disk and committed, regardless of
write operations. Defaults to `5s`. Values less than `100ms` are not allowed.

`index.translog.durability`::
+
--

Whether or not to `fsync` and commit the translog after every index, delete,
update, or bulk request.  This setting accepts the following parameters:

`request`::

    (default) `fsync` and commit after every request. In the event
    of hardware failure, all acknowledged writes will already have been
    committed to disk.

`async`::

    `fsync` and commit in the background every `sync_interval`. In
    the event of a failure, all acknowledged writes since the last
    automatic commit will be discarded.
--

`index.translog.flush_threshold_size`::

The translog stores all operations that are not yet safely persisted in Lucene
(i.e., are not part of a Lucene commit point). Although these operations are
available for reads, they will need to be reindexed if the shard was to
shutdown and has to be recovered. This settings controls the maximum total size
of these operations, to prevent recoveries from taking too long. Once the
maximum size has been reached a flush will happen, generating a new Lucene
commit point. Defaults to `512mb`.

`index.translog.retention.size`::

The total size of translog files to keep. Keeping more translog files increases
the chance of performing an operation based sync when recovering replicas. If
the translog files are not sufficient, replica recovery will fall back to a
file based sync. Defaults to `512mb`


`index.translog.retention.age`::

The maximum duration for which translog files will be kept. Defaults to `12h`.