The realtime GET API currently has erratic performance in case where a document is accessed
that has just been indexed but not refreshed yet, as the implementation will currently force an
internal refresh in that case. Refreshing can be an expensive operation, and also will block the
thread that executes the GET operation, blocking other GETs to be processed. In case of
frequent access of recently indexed documents, this can lead to a refresh storm and terrible
GET performance.
While older versions of Elasticsearch (2.x and older) did not trigger refreshes and instead opted
to read from the translog in case of realtime GET API or update API, this was removed in 5.0
(#20102) to avoid inconsistencies between values that were returned from the translog and
those returned by the index. This was partially reverted in 6.3 (#29264) to allow _update and
upsert to read from the translog again as it was easier to guarantee consistency for these, and
also brought back more predictable performance characteristics of this API. Calls to the realtime
GET API, however, would still always do a refresh if necessary to return consistent results. This
means that users that were calling realtime GET APIs to coordinate updates on client side
(realtime GET + CAS for conditional index of updated doc) would still see very erratic
performance.
This PR (together with #48707) resolves the inconsistencies between reading from translog and
index. In particular it fixes the inconsistencies that happen when requesting stored fields, which
were not available when reading from translog. In case where stored fields are requested, this
PR will reparse the _source from the translog and derive the stored fields to be returned. With
this, it changes the realtime GET API to allow reading from the translog again, avoid refresh
storms and blocking the GET threadpool, and provide overall much better and predictable
performance for this API.
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