Chapter 10. Improving performance

Elasticsearch is commonly referred to as fast when it comes to indexing, searching, and extracting statistics through aggregations. Fast is a vague concept, making the “How fast?” question inevitable. As with everything, “how fast” depends on the particular use case, hardware, and configuration.

In this chapter, our aim is to show you the best practices for configuring Elasticsearch so you can make it perform well for your use case. In every situation, you need to trade something for speed, so you need to pick your battles:

10.1. Grouping requests

10.2. Optimizing the handling of Lucene segments

10.3. Making the best use of caches

10.4. Other performance tradeoffs

10.5. Summary