# \_forcemerge query not working? (from Elastic Cloud - ES 2.1.1)

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/-forcemerge-query-not-working-from-elastic-cloud-es-2-1-1/41402>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [February 10, 2016, 4:20pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/-forcemerge-query-not-working-from-elastic-cloud-es-2-1-1/41402 "2016-02-10T16:20:58Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![erikthered](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c77e96/32.png) [@erikthered](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/erikthered)\
**Post date:** [February 10, 2016, 4:20pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/-forcemerge-query-not-working-from-elastic-cloud-es-2-1-1/41402/1 "2016-02-10T16:20:58Z")

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Continuing the discussion from [\_forcemerge query not working?](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/-forcemerge-query-not-working/41397):

> [@On another topic](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/41397/1):
>
> Hello,
> 
> I have an index that was around 460GB. I performed a delete by query on said index to remove ~3/4 of all the documents from the index. I understand (after reading lot's of documentation) about how Lucene just flags these documents for indexing, and later performs deletes upon merging it's segments.
> 
> The problem is that Lucene only slightly merged my segments after this delete. The cluster size, after the merge, barely decreased. I was expecting ~2-300GB of space to be freed.
> 
> I tried using the forcemerge (then even the deprecated \_optimize) query, specifying the maxnum\_segments to 1, then specifying the only\_expunge\_deletes parameters, these don't seem to have any effect at all (perhaps they don't override the elastic Found cluster settings?)
> 
> running \_cat/segments shows, for this index, ~100 segments like this:
> 
> index 0 p IP\_ADDRESS \_55g 6676 259526 492417 10.7gb 15986248 true true 5.3.1 false  
> index 0 p IP\_ADDRESS \_dlk 17624 300293 393906 10.5gb 17363328 true true 5.3.1 false  
> index 0 p IP\_ADDRESS \_do3 17715 304912 228060 8.3gb 16702931 true true 5.3.1 false  
> index 0 p IP\_ADDRESS \_etl 19209 234812 212975 6.2gb 14415090 true true 5.3.1 false  
> index 0 p IP\_ADDRESS \_rph 35909 243908 597468 11.6gb 16228232 true true 5.3.1 false  
> index 0 p IP\_ADDRESS \_xyq 44018 211087 600916 10.6gb 14982992 true true 5.3.1 false  
> index 0 p IP\_ADDRESS \_10f1 47197 150588 563340 7.9gb 12553617 true true 5.3.1 true  
> index 0 p IP\_ADDRESS \_10m5 47453 245789 347914 8.2gb 14972958 true true 5.3.1 true  
> index 0 p IP\_ADDRESS \_5ujm 272866 182584 1105416 15.5gb 15480243 true true 5.3.1 true  
> index 0 p IP\_ADDRESS \_5ujq 272870 175804 820951 11.5gb 14322993 true true 5.3.1 true  
> index 0 p IP\_ADDRESS \_5ujw 272876 6557 1411516 6.5gb 7773895 true true 5.3.1 true  
> index 0 p IP\_ADDRESS \_5uye 273398 6534 791621 4.3gb 6949108 true true 5.3.1 true  
> index 0 p IP\_ADDRESS \_5vtv 274531 12933 811501 6.1gb 10845022 true true 5.3.1 true...
> 
> Shouldn't these segments be triggering a merge automatically? Some have a deleted % of 99.5%
> 
> What's preventing Lucene from cleaning up these segments for me?
> 
> Cluster ID: 3daac0

This is a very specific elasticsearch-centric question; I've reposted this in the appropriate topic.

The issue in question is around **Elasticsearch 2.1.1**.

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**Author:** ![mikemccand](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f04885/32.png) [@mikemccand](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/mikemccand)\
**Post date:** [March 1, 2016, 2:49pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/-forcemerge-query-not-working-from-elastic-cloud-es-2-1-1/41402/2 "2016-03-01T14:49:33Z")

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Hmm there was this bug in Lucene:

[https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-6166](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-6166)

where Lucene failed to trigger merges if all you did was delete and never add any documents, but it was fixed in Lucene 5.3.0 and should be included in ES 2.1.1, so you should have seen merges running without having asked for `forceMerge`. Have you added any documents since doing the deletions?

Are you sure there are no merges running? They will take quite some time to complete. What `refresh_interval` do you have?

Separately, `forceMerge` definitely should have done something.

Can you post any settings you've changed from defaults?

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [July 5, 2017, 11:12pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/-forcemerge-query-not-working-from-elastic-cloud-es-2-1-1/41402/3 "2017-07-05T23:12:28Z")

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