From my understanding, nodes only can perform write operations on documents if they own their primary shard. Therefore if we have 2 nodes A, B and A owns the primary shard of the doc D, if the client asks node B to modify document D, node B will route the requests to node A which is the owner or D's primary shard. Obviously it would be better for the client to directly request to the node which is owner the primary shard of a specific document to perform write operations. My question is that whether common Elasticsearch clients (Kibana, python, etc) try to utilize this fact to make their requests more performant?
No, I do not believe they do. Elasticsearch can relocate shards at any point so this would add a lot of complexity for little gain. A lot of the time indexing is also done through bulk requests, which could target multiple shards spread across the cluster where this type of request routing would not be beneficial.
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Thanks for your reply. So the client can determine primary shard of the document but can not determine the node which has the shard, right?
The client does not care/know how many shards an index have or where they are located. This is handled by the node receiving the request. A client can send an index request to an index that does not yet exist and have it created automatically.
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