Supercharge Your Searches: A Guide to Tuning Elasticsearch for Speed

Elasticsearch is a powerful search and analytics engine that can handle a vast amount of data. However, as with any system, its performance can be influenced by how it’s configured. This blog post will guide you through the process of tuning Elasticsearch for speed at query time, with a focus on keyword search and vector search tuning.

Why Tune Elasticsearch?

The default settings of Elasticsearch are designed to work well for most use cases. However, depending on your specific needs and the nature of your data, you might need to adjust these settings to optimize performance. Tuning Elasticsearch can help you achieve faster query times, which can be crucial for applications that require real-time data retrieval.

Tuning Keyword Search

Keyword search is one of the most common operations in Elasticsearch. Here are some tips to tune keyword search for speed:

Use the filter context: When you're filtering documents (i.e., when you're not interested in scoring), use the filter context instead of the query context. This can significantly improve performance because Elasticsearch can skip the scoring phase.

GET /my_index/_search
{
  "query": {
    "bool": {
      "filter": {…