Mastering Elasticsearch 5.x - Third Edition

Scaling Elasticsearch

As we already know, Elasticsearch is a highly scalable search and analytics platform. We can scale it both horizontally and vertically.

Vertical scaling

When we talk about vertical scaling, we often mean adding more resources to the server Elasticsearch is running on; we can add memory and we can switch to a machine with better CPU or faster disk storage. Of course, with better machines, we can expect increase in performance; depending on our deployment and its bottleneck, there can be smaller or higher improvement. However, there are limitations when it comes to vertical scaling. For example, one is the maximum amount of physical memory available for your servers or the total memory required by the JVM to operate. When you ...