Different thread priorities for indexing vs. searching?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi,

ES has different thread pools for indexing, searching, etc. Is it possible to tell ES to set different priority on indexing vs. search requests? I didn't see a way to do that.

Wouldn't that be very valuable, especially for the popular logging use case?

Thanks,
Otis

Monitoring - Log Management - Alerting - Anomaly Detection
Elasticsearch Consulting - Support - Training - http://sematext.com/

2

A good idea in general, but not a good idea on the JVM.

  • you have to be root to raise priority of threads (on Linux at least), so the question is if lowering thread priorities is of any benefit
  • lowering thread priorities make threads always run slower (see UNIX 'nice')
  • you need to instruct ES users how to map Java threads to OS native threads on the specific hardware, which is flaky when using -XX:ThreadPriorityPolicy e.g. by not-so-well documented JVM flags like
-XX:ThreadPriorityPolicy=42
-XX:JavaPriority10_To_OSPriority=0
-XX:JavaPriority9_To_OSPriority=1
-XX:JavaPriority8_To_OSPriority=2
-XX:JavaPriority7_To_OSPriority=3
-XX:JavaPriority6_To_OSPriority=4
-XX:JavaPriority5_To_OSPriority=5
-XX:JavaPriority4_To_OSPriority=6
-XX:JavaPriority3_To_OSPriority=7
-XX:JavaPriority2_To_OSPriority=8
-XX:JavaPriority1_To_OSPriority=9
  • thread behavior varies from JDK to JDK version, e.g. on Solaris, see https://blogs.oracle.com/dave/entry/java_thread_priority_revisted_in
  • thread management depends also on the JVM implementation
  • I'm not familiar with Windows but I bet it's a totally different story
  • from OS to OS, threads would behave differently, which opens a can of worms
3

Hi,

Hmmm, I think we are out of sync. I'm not referring to process priorities and "nice". I'm referring to Thread class in Java:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/Thread.html
"Every thread has a priority. Threads with higher priority are executed in preference to threads with lower priority...."

And here are the 3 priorities:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/Thread.html#field_summary

So this is a Java-level thing (and maybe it translates to OS-level processes or threads, which must be different on different OSes, but that's "not my concern" here) and I'm thinking it would be useful to be able to configure:
index pool priority: min
search pool priority: max
etc.

Wouldn't that be helpful and super easy to implement?

Otis

Monitoring - Log Management - Alerting - Anomaly Detection
Elasticsearch Consulting - Support - Training - http://sematext.com/