Deleting/Recreating specific replica?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
#1

We have a 1.7.1 cluster that I just setup a new repo on for snapshots, so I had to restart the cluster.

Was a graceful restart. Cluster hadn't been restarted in quite a while (months).

When it came up we had a number of unassigned replicas. I manually rerouted these, but now I have a number of replica shards that are stuck on initializing.

Some of these are pretty big (15-30gb) due to some poor choices on num of shards (we'll be correcting that after we move to 2.3.2).

Is there a way to specifically delete and recreate a specific replica? Or do I have to set the number of replicas to 0 then back up to 1 to recreate all replicas?

#2

That's not that big really.[quote="ronchalant, post:1, topic:49459"]
Is there a way to specifically delete and recreate a specific replica? Or do I have to set the number of replicas to 0 then back up to 1 to recreate all replicas?
[/quote]

The latter.

#3

yeah by big I meant I think shards of 15-30gb for a growing index is going on the large side? I recently created a new index that we're expecting to grow quickly - it'll start at around 2TB and will grow about 1TB/year. Not super huge by Elastic standards, but it has me looking much more closely at shard allocation than I had previously.

Regarding the issue here in the thread, I had to step away from this for a while and the shards did eventually initialize after a couple hours. It just didn't make much sense to me since these indexes in question are relatively small overall.

#4

It could have been cluster recovery tasks holding things up, 1.X didn't have as many optimisations as 2.X for recovery etc.

#5