# ElasticSearch ForceMerge
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-forcemerge/65677
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [November 10, 2016, 2:36pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-forcemerge/65677 "2016-11-10T14:36:39Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@mike\_giardinelli](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/mike_giardinelli)
#### Post date: [November 10, 2016, 2:36pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-forcemerge/65677/1 "2016-11-10T14:36:39Z")
Hi all, we are running ES 2.3 and have indexes that are no longer being written to. Those indexes have what a appear to be a lot of segments and deletes. I wanted to try and "optimize" them for search, now that they no longer have docs being written to them. However, when i used the force merge and force merge with expunge deletes, I am not seeing it do anything.
Example Index:
170M docs
~500 GB
268 segments
~15M deleted docs
Wanted to try and reduce the #segments and cleanup the old deletes.
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### Author:  [@bhatch](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/bhatch)
#### Post date: [November 10, 2016, 4:56pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-forcemerge/65677/2 "2016-11-10T16:56:23Z")
Try setting max\_num\_segments equal to 1 when you do the forcemerge.
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### Author:  [@mike\_giardinelli](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/mike_giardinelli)
#### Post date: [December 8, 2016, 4:16pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-forcemerge/65677/3 "2016-12-08T16:16:13Z")
Thanks man. I will give that a try.
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2017, 4:16pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-forcemerge/65677/4 "2017-01-05T16:16:26Z")
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