# Clarification: how does floor\_segment impact merge rate?
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/clarification-how-does-floor-segment-impact-merge-rate/45453
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [March 25, 2016, 2:54pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/clarification-how-does-floor-segment-impact-merge-rate/45453 "2016-03-25T14:54:29Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@unknownunknown](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/unknownunknown)
#### Post date: [March 25, 2016, 2:54pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/clarification-how-does-floor-segment-impact-merge-rate/45453/1 "2016-03-25T14:54:29Z")
In this discussion ([Slow Bulk Insert - #8 by kayngee](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/slow-bulk-insert/10552/8)) I found that:
> As for the merge policy, tuning it for more segments will trade some search performance for indexing performance. But increasing the floor\_segment size is going to create more concurrent merging, especially coupled with higher max\_merge\_at\_once\* settings. So I'd only increase segments\_per\_tier.
This conflicts with my understanding of floor\_segment ([Merge | Elasticsearch Guide [1.6] | Elastic](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.6/index-modules-merge.html)):
> index.merge.policy.floor\_segment:
> Segments smaller than this are "rounded up" to this size, i.e. treated as
> equal (floor) size for merge selection. This is to prevent frequent
> flushing of tiny segments, thus preventing a long tail in the index. Default
> is 2mb.
My reading of this is that a higher value here would reduce the likelihood of merging because of less flushing, but it is clear from the post above that my understanding could be rather backwards. Can anyone help clarify how floor\_segment is related to the merge rate: when floor\_segment increases or decreases, what is likely to happen to the merge frequency?
Thanks!
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 5, 2017, 11:05pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/clarification-how-does-floor-segment-impact-merge-rate/45453/2 "2017-07-05T23:05:10Z")