Advice on force merge

We have been seeing degraded search performance on our 2.3.2 cluster. In looking at our main index, some of the shards are more than 50% deleted documents, and there are 1,610 segments. This index has 360 million documents in 15 shards, and a large portion are updated often. I don't think that merging is able to keep up with the incoming/update rate. I need to address this, but I would like to merge out the old files asap. I had planned on doing this over the weekend, and i was going to pause writing to this index, and run a force merge, but...

  • I have read that with large shards / large # of segments can take a long time to run

  • There appears to be no way to monitor the status of the merge

  • There appears to be no way to cancel the force merge

In that I will have writes disabled, and search will probably be unavailable during the merge, I am hesitant to do this based on the bullets above (as I would want things back up and running in time to ensure all is well before start of day Monday). Do I have my information correct. Additional questions:

  1. I keep reading that you should only force merge on indexes you "no longer write to." Does that mean during the merge or at all? After the merge, I would need to open it back up for writing (understanding that I will likely get back to the same state eventually).

  2. Could I effectively do the same thing by reindexing to a new index? Though, I may have the same issues with monitoring /cancelling, right?

  3. Anything else I might consider that might speed regular live merging without degrading search performance further?

Thanks!

Ideally at all. If you want to merge and write, hold off writes until afterwards.

Yes.

Upgrade to 5.X, merges are much more intelligent.

Am I correct in my (bullets) assumptions that there is no way to monitor and/or cancel a force merge?

thanks,
~john

That is correct. Once started, there is no way to cancel a forceMerge. And there really isn't a way to check on its progress, either.

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