elasticsearch-hints

These links are outcome of 4+ years of tuning/running our ES clusters (on premise and in a cloud).

This list is not in the active development. Partially merged into https://github.com/dzharii/awesome-elasticsearch

Internals

• A Dive into the Elasticsearch Storage

  In this article we'll investigate the files written to the data directory by various parts of Elasticsearch. We will look at node, index and shard level files and give a short explanation of their contents in order to establish an understanding of the data written to disk by Elasticsearch.

Java tuning

• Elasticsearch Java Virtual Machine settings explained

• Tuning Garbage Collection for Mission-Critical Java Applications

• G1: One Garbage Collector To Rule Them All

• Use Lucene’s MMapDirectory on 64bit platforms, please!

• Black Magic cookbook

• G1GC Fundamentals: Lessons from Taming Garbage Collection

• JVM Garbage Collector settings investigation

  Comparison of jvm gc. Fantastic job!

• Garbage Collection Settings for Elasticsearch Master Nodes

  Fine tunine your garbage collector

• Understanding G1 GC Log Format

  To tune and troubleshoot G1 GC enabled JVMs, one must have a proper understanding of G1 GC log format. This article walks through key things that one should know about the G1 GC log format.

How to start using G1

#ES_JAVA_OPTS=""
ES_JAVA_OPTS="-XX:-UseParNewGC -XX:-UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+UseG1GC"

Durability & reliability

• Call me maybe: Elasticsearch

  In this post, we’ll explore Elasticsearch’s behavior under various types of network failure.

• Call me maybe: Elasticsearch 1.5.0

  Data-loss scenarios

• Transactions in Elasticsearch

  How to achieve transactions in Elasticsearch?

Performance

• Elasticsearch Refresh Interval vs Indexing Performance

  Because refreshing is expensive, one way to improve indexing throughput is by increasing refresh_interval. Less refreshing means less load, and more resources can go to the indexing threads. How does all this translate into performance? Below is what our benchmarks revealed when we looked at it

• A-Z Guide on Scaling Elasticsearch

  In this article we will discuss the system settings in detail. This will guide you on the parameters and values to be considered in various levels including the operating system (we are considering the Unix-based systems here). Focus will also be given to the memory settings in Elasticsearch, and we will look even deeper into the heap memory management and fine tuning of the same.

Monitoring

• Top 10 Elasticsearch Metrics to Watch

  This should be especially helpful to those readers new to Elasticsearch, and also to experienced users who want a quick start into performance monitoring of Elasticsearch.

• How to monitor Elasticsearch performance

  Very good article from Datadog

• What should you monitor

  Good checklist (with the explanations)

Best practices

• Elasticsearch Indexing Performance Cheatsheet

• Six Ways to Crash Elasticsearch

• Playing HTTP Tricks with Nginx

• Elasticsearch Tuning Plan

  Nice check list

• Choosing a fast unique identifier (UUID) for Lucene

  If have your own natural ID for each document, try to pick an ID that is friendly to Lucene.

Books

In order of my personal preferences

• Relevant Search - best book available on the market
• Deep Learning for search
• Mastering Elasticsearch - Second Edition
• ElasticSearch Cookbook Second Edition
• Elasticsearch Server Second Edition

Video

• "Surviving Elasticsearch"
• https://berlinbuzzwords.de/18/session/elasticsearch-index-management-paas-style-logging-system

Reading

• https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/listing-embeddings-for-similar-listing-recommendations-and-real-time-personalization-in-search-601172f7603e
• https://www.elastic.co/blog/modeling-data-for-fast-aggregations
• https://hackernoon.com/learning-to-rank-for-flight-itinerary-search-8594761eb867