How to reduce number of segments in elasticsearch index

Question

I have a two node elasticsearch cluster which is configured to have 5 shards and 2 replicas. After I indexed a db table with ~2M records, there are 124 segments generated under the corresponding cache. This number is too big, and I am afraid it would easily reach the hard limit of nofiles with more indices added.

Is there a way to reduce the number of segments per index? Thanks

Answer 1

You have control over merge policy in elasticsearch. The merge settings can be updated dynamically using Update Index Settings API. You can, for example, reduce index.merge.policy.segments_per_tier to some value below 10 and this will reduce the number of segments on each tier and, as a result, the total number of segments.

You can also force merge manually using Optimize API. For example:

$ curl -XPOST 'http://localhost:9200/your-index/_optimize?max_num_segments=1'

Answer 2

You can reduce the max number of segments using the following command

$ curl -XPOST 'http://localhost:9200/_forcemerge?max_num_segments=5'

in case of windows you will need to remove the inverted commas.