# Add new field to index using update\_by\_query
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/add-new-field-to-index-using-update-by-query/129498
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [April 25, 2018, 1:21pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/add-new-field-to-index-using-update-by-query/129498 "2018-04-25T13:21:05Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@nkaenzig](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/nkaenzig)
#### Post date: [April 25, 2018, 1:21pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/add-new-field-to-index-using-update-by-query/129498/1 "2018-04-25T13:21:06Z")
Dear Community,
I'm trying to add a new field to all documents that match a certain condition.
After doing some research I found that the update\_by\_query API might be a suitable method to achieve this.
What I have so far is the following:
> POST packets-test/\_update\_by\_query
> {
> "script": {
> "source": "ctx.\_source.status = 1",
> "lang": "painless"
> },
> "query": {
> "match": {
> "layers.ip.ip\_ip\_src": "10.7.6.2"
> }
> }
> }
In other words I want to add a "status" field with value 1 to all documents where the field "layers.ip.ip\_ip\_src" is "10.7.6.2" (type: ip).
However, running this, I get the following error:
> {
> "statusCode": 504,
> "error": "Gateway Time-out",
> "message": "Client request timeout"
> }
Am I doing something wrong?
My (test) index has 1.5mio documents and 484,003 of those match the above query condition.
However the real index where I would like to apply this to holds about 200mio documents.
Does update\_by\_query even scale to such dimensions? If not what would be a possible solution to do this in a reasonable amount of time?
(I use Elasticsearch 6.2)
EDIT:
Ich habe nun noch einen Versuch mit einer "match\_all" query gemacht (also um das Feld in allen Dokumenten zu updaten): So läuft es durch ohne timeout error, wenn auch ziemlich langsam.
1. warum läuft es nicht mit einer spezifischeren query?
2. wie kann man das schneller machen/parallelisieren (e.g. mit der Python API?)
---
### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [May 23, 2018, 1:21pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/add-new-field-to-index-using-update-by-query/129498/2 "2018-05-23T13:21:11Z")
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