Split index API

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Splits an existing index into a new index with more primary shards.

response = client.indices.split(
  index: 'my-index-000001',
  target: 'split-my-index-000001',
  body: {
    settings: {
      'index.number_of_shards' => 2
    }
  }
)
puts response
POST /my-index-000001/_split/split-my-index-000001
{
  "settings": {
    "index.number_of_shards": 2
  }
}

Request

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POST /<index>/_split/<target-index>

PUT /<index>/_split/<target-index>

Prerequisites

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  • If the Elasticsearch security features are enabled, you must have the manage index privilege for the index.
  • Before you can split an index:

    • The index must be read-only.
    • The cluster health status must be green.

You can do make an index read-only with the following request using the add index block API:

PUT /my_source_index/_block/write

The current write index on a data stream cannot be split. In order to split the current write index, the data stream must first be rolled over so that a new write index is created and then the previous write index can be split.

Description

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The split index API allows you to split an existing index into a new index, where each original primary shard is split into two or more primary shards in the new index.

The number of times the index can be split (and the number of shards that each original shard can be split into) is determined by the index.number_of_routing_shards setting. The number of routing shards specifies the hashing space that is used internally to distribute documents across shards with consistent hashing. For instance, a 5 shard index with number_of_routing_shards set to 30 (5 x 2 x 3) could be split by a factor of 2 or 3. In other words, it could be split as follows:

  • 51030 (split by 2, then by 3)
  • 51530 (split by 3, then by 2)
  • 530 (split by 6)

index.number_of_routing_shards is a static index setting. You can only set index.number_of_routing_shards at index creation time or on a closed index.

Index creation example

The following create index API creates the my-index-000001 index with an index.number_of_routing_shards setting of 30.

response = client.indices.create(
  index: 'my-index-000001',
  body: {
    settings: {
      index: {
        number_of_routing_shards: 30
      }
    }
  }
)
puts response
PUT /my-index-000001
{
  "settings": {
    "index": {
      "number_of_routing_shards": 30
    }
  }
}

The index.number_of_routing_shards setting’s default value depends on the number of primary shards in the original index. The default is designed to allow you to split by factors of 2 up to a maximum of 1024 shards. However, the original number of primary shards must taken into account. For instance, an index created with 5 primary shards could be split into 10, 20, 40, 80, 160, 320, or a maximum of 640 shards (with a single split action or multiple split actions).

If the original index contains one primary shard (or a multi-shard index has been shrunk down to a single primary shard), then the index may by split into an arbitrary number of shards greater than 1. The properties of the default number of routing shards will then apply to the newly split index.

How splitting works

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A split operation:

  1. Creates a new target index with the same definition as the source index, but with a larger number of primary shards.
  2. Hard-links segments from the source index into the target index. (If the file system doesn’t support hard-linking, then all segments are copied into the new index, which is a much more time consuming process.)
  3. Hashes all documents again, after low level files are created, to delete documents that belong to a different shard.
  4. Recovers the target index as though it were a closed index which had just been re-opened.

Why doesn’t Elasticsearch support incremental resharding?

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Going from N shards to N+1 shards, aka. incremental resharding, is indeed a feature that is supported by many key-value stores. Adding a new shard and pushing new data to this new shard only is not an option: this would likely be an indexing bottleneck, and figuring out which shard a document belongs to given its _id, which is necessary for get, delete and update requests, would become quite complex. This means that we need to rebalance existing data using a different hashing scheme.

The most common way that key-value stores do this efficiently is by using consistent hashing. Consistent hashing only requires 1/N-th of the keys to be relocated when growing the number of shards from N to N+1. However Elasticsearch’s unit of storage, shards, are Lucene indices. Because of their search-oriented data structure, taking a significant portion of a Lucene index, be it only 5% of documents, deleting them and indexing them on another shard typically comes with a much higher cost than with a key-value store. This cost is kept reasonable when growing the number of shards by a multiplicative factor as described in the above section: this allows Elasticsearch to perform the split locally, which in-turn allows to perform the split at the index level rather than reindexing documents that need to move, as well as using hard links for efficient file copying.

In the case of append-only data, it is possible to get more flexibility by creating a new index and pushing new data to it, while adding an alias that covers both the old and the new index for read operations. Assuming that the old and new indices have respectively M and N shards, this has no overhead compared to searching an index that would have M+N shards.

Split an index

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To split my_source_index into a new index called my_target_index, issue the following request:

response = client.indices.split(
  index: 'my_source_index',
  target: 'my_target_index',
  body: {
    settings: {
      'index.number_of_shards' => 2
    }
  }
)
puts response
POST /my_source_index/_split/my_target_index
{
  "settings": {
    "index.number_of_shards": 2
  }
}

The above request returns immediately once the target index has been added to the cluster state — it doesn’t wait for the split operation to start.

Indices can only be split if they satisfy the following requirements:

  • The target index must not exist
  • The source index must have fewer primary shards than the target index.
  • The number of primary shards in the target index must be a multiple of the number of primary shards in the source index.
  • The node handling the split process must have sufficient free disk space to accommodate a second copy of the existing index.

The _split API is similar to the create index API and accepts settings and aliases parameters for the target index:

response = client.indices.split(
  index: 'my_source_index',
  target: 'my_target_index',
  body: {
    settings: {
      'index.number_of_shards' => 5
    },
    aliases: {
      my_search_indices: {}
    }
  }
)
puts response
POST /my_source_index/_split/my_target_index
{
  "settings": {
    "index.number_of_shards": 5 
  },
  "aliases": {
    "my_search_indices": {}
  }
}

The number of shards in the target index. This must be a multiple of the number of shards in the source index.

Mappings may not be specified in the _split request.

Monitor the split process

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The split process can be monitored with the _cat recovery API, or the cluster health API can be used to wait until all primary shards have been allocated by setting the wait_for_status parameter to yellow.

The _split API returns as soon as the target index has been added to the cluster state, before any shards have been allocated. At this point, all shards are in the state unassigned. If, for any reason, the target index can’t be allocated, its primary shard will remain unassigned until it can be allocated on that node.

Once the primary shard is allocated, it moves to state initializing, and the split process begins. When the split operation completes, the shard will become active. At that point, Elasticsearch will try to allocate any replicas and may decide to relocate the primary shard to another node.

Wait for active shards

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Because the split operation creates a new index to split the shards to, the wait for active shards setting on index creation applies to the split index action as well.

Path parameters

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<index>
(Required, string) Name of the source index to split.
<target-index>

(Required, string) Name of the target index to create.

Index names must meet the following criteria:

  • Lowercase only
  • Cannot include \, /, *, ?, ", <, >, |, ` ` (space character), ,, #
  • Indices prior to 7.0 could contain a colon (:), but that’s been deprecated and won’t be supported in 7.0+
  • Cannot start with -, _, +
  • Cannot be . or ..
  • Cannot be longer than 255 bytes (note it is bytes, so multi-byte characters will count towards the 255 limit faster)
  • Names starting with . are deprecated, except for hidden indices and internal indices managed by plugins

Query parameters

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wait_for_active_shards

(Optional, string) The number of shard copies that must be active before proceeding with the operation. Set to all or any positive integer up to the total number of shards in the index (number_of_replicas+1). Default: 1, the primary shard.

See Active shards.

master_timeout
(Optional, time units) Period to wait for the master node. If the master node is not available before the timeout expires, the request fails and returns an error. Defaults to 30s. Can also be set to -1 to indicate that the request should never timeout.
timeout
(Optional, time units) Period to wait for a response. If no response is received before the timeout expires, the request fails and returns an error. Defaults to 30s.

Request body

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aliases

(Optional, object of objects) Aliases for the resulting index.

Properties of aliases objects
<alias>

(Required, object) The key is the alias name. Index alias names support date math.

The object body contains options for the alias. Supports an empty object.

Properties of <alias>
filter
(Optional, Query DSL object) Query used to limit documents the alias can access.
index_routing
(Optional, string) Value used to route indexing operations to a specific shard. If specified, this overwrites the routing value for indexing operations.
is_hidden
(Optional, Boolean) If true, the alias is hidden. Defaults to false. All indices for the alias must have the same is_hidden value.
is_write_index
(Optional, Boolean) If true, the index is the write index for the alias. Defaults to false.
routing
(Optional, string) Value used to route indexing and search operations to a specific shard.
search_routing
(Optional, string) Value used to route search operations to a specific shard. If specified, this overwrites the routing value for search operations.
settings
(Optional, index setting object) Configuration options for the target index. See Index settings.