If you're using a synonym and / or stopwords file as part of your search analyzer definition my understanding is that you can update the analyzer by updating the synonym or stopwords file on every member of the cluster. Is there an API method to update the file on each cluster member, or is this a manual process? If it is manual, is there any recommended scripts to makes this task simpler?
Also, once the file is deployed I believe you just need to re-load the analyzers (since this is just a search analyzer, no re-index required). The recommended approach is to close and re-open the index, or restart each node one at a time. If you restart each node in this way, won't some have different synonym / stopwords files during the process? Does this cause any problems, or just mean you might get inconsistent results until all the nodes have restarted?