How stable is ElasticSearch service on your forum?

[Vladislav Rastrusny]

Hello, guys.

I've heard, that Elastic can be quite unstable when running on a single machine (not in the cluster configuration). What is your experience with? How stable is it on your forum?

 

[D.O.A.]

 

[rdn]

Ensuring you set the maximum memory usage correctly is critical.

Via ES_HEAP_SIZE ?
Or there are some other variable?

 

[Xon]

Via ES_HEAP_SIZE ?
Or there are some other variable?

Yes, setting ES_HEAP_SIZE in /etc/sysconfig/elasticsearch (or whatever it is located for your distro) is critical.

 

[jeffwidman]

Super stable for me on two different servers. I'm not running a multi-node cluster, but I know folks who do and are really happy with the performance + stability.

 

[Robust]

@digitalpoint runs a multi node cluster, I believe. Not sure if he made any additional customisations, however.

 

[digitalpoint]

Never had any stability or performance issues (I run an 8 node cluster).

 

[jeffwidman]

Just updated to v2. I got bit by this issue: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/12688

Once I figured that out, everything else was smooth sailing and seems to be working fine.

 

[rdn]

15M Post Forum on single Dedicated Server along side with Nginx/MariaDB/PHP/Redis.

 

[Wildcat Media]

Once we had the host do a few tweaks to keep Java running, it has run with no issues. I think only one time in the past few years, we've had to manually restart it. We've had a ton of traffic lately, at least 1,800 visitors online (about 60/40 guests to members). We've had a couple of complaints about some odd search results, but with some of those, I think they don't know how to search wisely.

My issue today is that we run an older version and I'm not certain if either 1.7.4 or 2.1.1 requires any different or new settings in the configuration files. We have enough traffic that I don't want to be messing around with ElasticSearch and have search be offline each attempt I make at getting it running properly. I expect it will run nicely once configured properly. It may even run more efficiently. Our version is quite old.

 

[digitalpoint]

The main difference from older version to new version for us was that ElasticSearch no longer uses multicast to discover sibling nodes. It switched to unicast and you need to define host(s) that act as "gossip routers" for discovery. That really was the only thing I think. If it helps, this is our settings:

 

[Mouth]

My issue today is that we run an older version and I'm not certain if either 1.7.4 or 2.1.1 requires any different or new settings in the configuration files. [...] Our version is quite old.

How old? Hard to say if you don't mention how far behind you are?
Probably better to remove your current config, and let your package installer use the config that comes with the current version - it's probably fine.

 

[Wildcat Media]

The main difference from older version to new version for us was that ElasticSearch no longer uses multicast to discover sibling nodes. It switched to unicast and you need to define host(s) that act as "gossip routers" for discovery. That really was the only thing I think.

Since we are not using that feature, we should probably be OK then.

Probably better to remove your current config, and let your package installer use the config that comes with the current version - it's probably fine.

Since I installed it so long ago (before it was in any of the repos), it started as a manual install. From what I've seen, the 2.1.1 version has a far shorter config file than what we have now. I agree--it'll probably be fine.