An index is made up of buckets, which go through a specific life cycle. Each bucket contains events from a particular period of time.
As touched on in Chapter 11, Configuring Splunk, the stages of this lifecycle are hot, warm, cold, frozen, and thawed. The only practical difference between hot and other buckets is that a hot bucket is being written to, and has not necessarily been optimized. These stages live in different places on the disk and are controlled by different settings in indexes.conf:
- homePath contains as many hot buckets as the integer value of maxHotBuckets, and as many warm buckets as the integer value of maxWarmDBCount. When a hot bucket rolls, it becomes a warm bucket. When there are too many ...