Elasticsearch - Option to set number of shards

[RevengeFNF]

In Elasticsearch, its possible to set the number of Shards the index will use when creating the Index. IPS is using the default 5 shards, which is not optimal for everybody(probably for most of the clients). For example in my case i only use 1 node(localhost) and my Index is way below 50Gb, so my optimal shard count is only 1. 
5 shards in my case is slowing down elasticsearch.

Its possible in the Elasticsearch options to have a field to choose the number of shards?

Basically depending on the value we choose it would add something like this:

    "settings" : {
      "number_of_shards": 2
    }

 

[RevengeFNF]

If anyone wants to manual set the number of shards, you can create a template and then you just need to reindex the search.

For the template creation, you just need to run this on your server:

curl -XPUT http://localhost:9200/_template/content -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '
{
    "template" : "content*",
    "settings" : {
      "number_of_shards": 1
    },
    "mappings" : {
      "content" : {
      }
    }
}'

With this template i have set the number of shard's to 1 and then i just reindex the search and its working fine.

Elasticsearch always recommends to use only 1 shard per node, unless the data is bigger than 50Gb. In that case its better to split the data into more shards. But more than 1 shard per node, its going to be slower than just 1 shard.

[Linguica]

I would also like to see this added.

[Michael Grote]

Me too 

[maddog107_merged]

On 5/5/2018 at 9:59 AM, RevengeFNF said:

If anyone wants to manual set the number of shards, you can create a template and then you just need to reindex the search.

For the template creation, you just need to run this on your server:

curl -XPUT http://localhost:9200/_template/content -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '
{
    "template" : "content*",
    "settings" : {
      "number_of_shards": 1
    },
    "mappings" : {
      "content" : {
      }
    }
}'

With this template i have set the number of shard's to 1 and then i just reindex the search and its working fine.

Elasticsearch always recommends to use only 1 shard per node, unless the data is bigger than 50Gb. In that case its better to split the data into more shards. But more than 1 shard per node, its going to be slower than just 1 shard.

 

The only article I saw on the matter was from 2014, do you have any benchmarks? I have a very powerful machine with lots of cores and SSD's, I would be curious to know if going from 5->1 makes a huge diff. 

I run it on a single node (maybe I should disable replication). 

 

[root@BZ1 ~]# curl 'http://192.168.50.100:9200/_cat/indices?v'
health status index     uuid                   pri rep docs.count docs.deleted store.size pri.store.size
yellow open   images    UKZClgI0TUWFSyKQ0LH9sg   5   1    5412415            0     19.5gb         19.5gb
yellow open   bz_search e_JEGBY4SWSElKt1ovqAig   5   1    4634505      1974140     12.7gb         12.7gb