136 lines
6.3 KiB
Plaintext
136 lines
6.3 KiB
Plaintext
[[tune-for-indexing-speed]]
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== Tune for indexing speed
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[float]
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=== Use bulk requests
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Bulk requests will yield much better performance than single-document index
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requests. In order to know the optimal size of a bulk request, you should run
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a benchmark on a single node with a single shard. First try to index 100
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documents at once, then 200, then 400, etc. doubling the number of documents
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in a bulk request in every benchmark run. When the indexing speed starts to
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plateau then you know you reached the optimal size of a bulk request for your
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data. In case of tie, it is better to err in the direction of too few rather
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than too many documents. Beware that too large bulk requests might put the
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cluster under memory pressure when many of them are sent concurrently, so
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it is advisable to avoid going beyond a couple tens of megabytes per request
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even if larger requests seem to perform better.
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[float]
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[[multiple-workers-threads]]
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=== Use multiple workers/threads to send data to Elasticsearch
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A single thread sending bulk requests is unlikely to be able to max out the
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indexing capacity of an Elasticsearch cluster. In order to use all resources
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of the cluster, you should send data from multiple threads or processes. In
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addition to making better use of the resources of the cluster, this should
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help reduce the cost of each fsync.
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Make sure to watch for `TOO_MANY_REQUESTS (429)` response codes
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(`EsRejectedExecutionException` with the Java client), which is the way that
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Elasticsearch tells you that it cannot keep up with the current indexing rate.
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When it happens, you should pause indexing a bit before trying again, ideally
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with randomized exponential backoff.
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Similarly to sizing bulk requests, only testing can tell what the optimal
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number of workers is. This can be tested by progressively increasing the
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number of workers until either I/O or CPU is saturated on the cluster.
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[float]
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=== Unset or increase the refresh interval
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The operation that consists of making changes visible to search - called a
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<<indices-refresh,refresh>> - is costly, and calling it often while there is
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ongoing indexing activity can hurt indexing speed.
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include::{docdir}/indices/refresh.asciidoc[tag=refresh-interval-default]
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This is the optimal configuration if you have no or very little search traffic
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(e.g. less than one search request every 5 minutes) and want to optimize for
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indexing speed. This behavior aims to automatically optimize bulk indexing in
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the default case when no searches are performed. In order to opt out of this
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behavior set the refresh interval explicitly.
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On the other hand, if your index experiences regular search requests, this
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default behavior means that Elasticsearch will refresh your index every 1
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second. If you can afford to increase the amount of time between when a document
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gets indexed and when it becomes visible, increasing the
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<<index-refresh-interval-setting,`index.refresh_interval`>> to a larger value, e.g.
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`30s`, might help improve indexing speed.
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[float]
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=== Disable refresh and replicas for initial loads
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If you need to load a large amount of data at once, you should disable refresh
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by setting `index.refresh_interval` to `-1` and set `index.number_of_replicas`
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to `0`. This will temporarily put your index at risk since the loss of any shard
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will cause data loss, but at the same time indexing will be faster since
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documents will be indexed only once. Once the initial loading is finished, you
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can set `index.refresh_interval` and `index.number_of_replicas` back to their
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original values.
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[float]
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=== Disable swapping
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You should make sure that the operating system is not swapping out the java
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process by <<setup-configuration-memory,disabling swapping>>.
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[float]
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=== Give memory to the filesystem cache
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The filesystem cache will be used in order to buffer I/O operations. You should
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make sure to give at least half the memory of the machine running Elasticsearch
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to the filesystem cache.
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[float]
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=== Use auto-generated ids
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When indexing a document that has an explicit id, Elasticsearch needs to check
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whether a document with the same id already exists within the same shard, which
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is a costly operation and gets even more costly as the index grows. By using
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auto-generated ids, Elasticsearch can skip this check, which makes indexing
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faster.
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[float]
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=== Use faster hardware
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If indexing is I/O bound, you should investigate giving more memory to the
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filesystem cache (see above) or buying faster drives. In particular SSD drives
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are known to perform better than spinning disks. Always use local storage,
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remote filesystems such as `NFS` or `SMB` should be avoided. Also beware of
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virtualized storage such as Amazon's `Elastic Block Storage`. Virtualized
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storage works very well with Elasticsearch, and it is appealing since it is so
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fast and simple to set up, but it is also unfortunately inherently slower on an
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ongoing basis when compared to dedicated local storage. If you put an index on
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`EBS`, be sure to use provisioned IOPS otherwise operations could be quickly
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throttled.
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Stripe your index across multiple SSDs by configuring a RAID 0 array. Remember
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that it will increase the risk of failure since the failure of any one SSD
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destroys the index. However this is typically the right tradeoff to make:
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optimize single shards for maximum performance, and then add replicas across
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different nodes so there's redundancy for any node failures. You can also use
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<<modules-snapshots,snapshot and restore>> to backup the index for further
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insurance.
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[float]
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=== Indexing buffer size
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If your node is doing only heavy indexing, be sure
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<<indexing-buffer,`indices.memory.index_buffer_size`>> is large enough to give
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at most 512 MB indexing buffer per shard doing heavy indexing (beyond that
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indexing performance does not typically improve). Elasticsearch takes that
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setting (a percentage of the java heap or an absolute byte-size), and
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uses it as a shared buffer across all active shards. Very active shards will
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naturally use this buffer more than shards that are performing lightweight
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indexing.
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The default is `10%` which is often plenty: for example, if you give the JVM
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10GB of memory, it will give 1GB to the index buffer, which is enough to host
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two shards that are heavily indexing.
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[float]
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=== Additional optimizations
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Many of the strategies outlined in <<tune-for-disk-usage>> also
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provide an improvement in the speed of indexing.
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