WARNING: Version 2.4 of Elasticsearch has passed its EOL date.

This documentation is no longer being maintained and may be removed. If you are running this version, we strongly advise you to upgrade. For the latest information, see the current release documentation.

« Indices Node Query Cache »
Elastic Docs ›Elasticsearch Guide [2.4] ›Modules ›Indices

Circuit Breaker

edit

Circuit Breaker

edit

Elasticsearch contains multiple circuit breakers used to prevent operations from causing an OutOfMemoryError. Each breaker specifies a limit for how much memory it can use. Additionally, there is a parent-level breaker that specifies the total amount of memory that can be used across all breakers.

These settings can be dynamically updated on a live cluster with the cluster-update-settings API.

Parent circuit breaker

edit

The parent-level breaker can be configured with the following setting:

indices.breaker.total.limit
Starting limit for overall parent breaker, defaults to 70% of JVM heap.

Field data circuit breaker

edit

The field data circuit breaker allows Elasticsearch to estimate the amount of memory a field will require to be loaded into memory. It can then prevent the field data loading by raising an exception. By default the limit is configured to 60% of the maximum JVM heap. It can be configured with the following parameters:

indices.breaker.fielddata.limit
Limit for fielddata breaker, defaults to 60% of JVM heap
indices.breaker.fielddata.overhead
A constant that all field data estimations are multiplied with to determine a final estimation. Defaults to 1.03

Request circuit breaker

edit

The request circuit breaker allows Elasticsearch to prevent per-request data structures (for example, memory used for calculating aggregations during a request) from exceeding a certain amount of memory.

indices.breaker.request.limit
Limit for request breaker, defaults to 40% of JVM heap
indices.breaker.request.overhead
A constant that all request estimations are multiplied with to determine a final estimation. Defaults to 1

In flight requests circuit breaker

edit

The in flight requests circuit breaker allows Elasticsearch to limit the memory usage of all currently active incoming requests on transport or HTTP level from exceeding a certain amount of memory on a node. The memory usage is based on the content length of the request itself.

network.breaker.inflight_requests.limit
Limit for in flight requests breaker, defaults to 100% of JVM heap. This means that it is bound by the limit configured for the parent circuit breaker.
network.breaker.inflight_requests.overhead
A constant that all in flight requests estimations are multiplied with to determine a final estimation. Defaults to 1

Fielddata

edit

The field data cache is used mainly when sorting on or computing aggregations on a field. It loads all the field values to memory in order to provide fast document based access to those values. The field data cache can be expensive to build for a field, so its recommended to have enough memory to allocate it, and to keep it loaded.

The amount of memory used for the field data cache can be controlled using indices.fielddata.cache.size. Note: reloading the field data which does not fit into your cache will be expensive and perform poorly.

indices.fielddata.cache.size
The max size of the field data cache, eg 30% of node heap space, or an absolute value, eg 12GB. Defaults to unbounded. Also see Field data circuit breaker.

These are static settings which must be configured on every data node in the cluster.

Monitoring field data

edit

You can monitor memory usage for field data as well as the field data circuit breaker using Nodes Stats API

« Indices Node Query Cache »