This change automatically pre-sort search shards on search requests that use a primary sort based on the value of a field. When possible, the can_match phase will extract the min/max (depending on the provided sort order) values of each shard and use it to pre-sort the shards prior to running the subsequent phases. This feature can be useful to ensure that shards that contain recent data are executed first so that intermediate merge have more chance to contain contiguous data (think of date_histogram for instance) but it could also be used in a follow up to early terminate sorted top-hits queries that don't require the total hit count. The latter could significantly speed up the retrieval of the most/least
recent documents from time-based indices.
Relates #49091
ed4eecc00e