ElasticSearch: array size inside of terms query cannot exceed 1000 indices

Question

I have a query like so:

"filter": { "query": { "terms": { "user": ["jonh", "doe", ..., "asdf"]} } }

The number of users in the array is arbitrarily big for our use case. However, ElasticSearch seems to fail with "SearchPhaseExecutionException[Failed to execute phase [query], total failure; when the size of the array surpasses 1027.

Is this the expected behavior? If so, is there a way to increase the size of the accepted array?

Answer 1

Your request is using terms query, which is getting translated into boolean query, which by default doesn't accept more than 1024 terms. However, since you are using it as a filter later on, it will be actually faster to switch to using terms filter, which doesn't have this limitation. All you have to do is remove query filter from your request:

"filter": { "terms": { "user": ["jonh", "doe", ..., "asdf"]} }