I have read about the implementation of ElasticSearch and I have some doubts.
Among other things, I saw that it is difficult to stipulate the ideal configuration, it is necessary to get some data from it in order to be able to configure it correctly.

But before doing anything I hava some questions...

We have 133k active users per month in the forum, our database does not have 2GB at the moment ..
When is it worth using it?

Should I hire a new hosting service for it or can I use the same server with more memory?
Follow our current configuration
vCPUs: 4
Memory: 8 GB

How many posts do you have that could be searched?

We have 290,599 posts in 43,432 threads.

I think it’s worth it for your community. That’s quite a bit of data to search through and using elastic search will make it much easier to find what you’re looking for

I got Elastic Search set up with Amazon:

https://aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/

Was easy to do, and either free or extremely cheap for this scale. Re-indexed in less than an hour, I think. Try it out and you can switch back easily. 

Hi,

 

Does anyone know if an Amazon instance m4.large.elasticsearch is enough? Or we can go with lower specs?

m4.large.elasticsearch
vCPU: 2
Memory: 8 GB

 

 

It's extremely easy to move up and down the instances - I'd just start with the smallest and keep an eye on the indices. I'm on the smallest and stay comfortably in the yellow. 

And how is your community? number of posts, users and size of the database?

Same or less users, larger database, I think. Although I'd think the key variable is how many searches are getting run. 

The Elasticsearch console literally has a drop-down menu to use to switch instances - it couldn't be easier. I'd start with the smallest and see what happens.