# Elasticsearch on EC2. What kind of instance types to use? **URL:** \ **Category:** Elasticsearch\ **Created:** [December 3, 2012, 10:42am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-on-ec2-what-kind-of-instance-types-to-use/9918 "2012-12-03T10:42:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![fonzo14](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/898d66/32.png) [@fonzo14](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/fonzo14)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2012, 10:42am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-on-ec2-what-kind-of-instance-types-to-use/9918/1 "2012-12-03T10:42:33Z")
Hi, I guess many of us are deploying elasticsearch on EC2 or plan to do it. It would be great if some ES experts can give us some hints on how to choose the EC2 instance types. I know, price is the first parameter to consider. But still, they are many options on how to spend our money : x strong box vs 2x less strong box ? RAM vs CPU ? EBS ? I guess, it depends on the usage (facets ...). For example, What would you recommend ? A 4 node cluster with 32Go ram instances or a 7 node cluster with 16 Go ram instances ? If any of you have some recommendations to give ... Thanks. -- ---
**Author:** ![Robin\_Verlangen](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/robin_verlangen/32/1542_2.png) [@Robin\_Verlangen](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Robin_Verlangen)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2012, 12:33pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-on-ec2-what-kind-of-instance-types-to-use/9918/2 "2012-12-03T12:33:50Z")
Interesting topic, look forward to the several different approaches. If you allow me to be so free: would a 14 node cluster with just 8GB of RAM be interesting (m1.large)? Or even a 28 node cluster with 4GB (m1.medium)? Best regards, Robin Verlangen _Software engineer_ \* \* W [http://www.robinverlangen.nl](http://www.robinverlangen.nl) E robin@us2.nl [http://goo.gl/Lt7BC](http://goo.gl/Lt7BC) Disclaimer: The information contained in this message and attachments is intended solely for the attention and use of the named addressee and may be confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, you are reminded that the information remains the property of the sender. You must not use, disclose, distribute, copy, print or rely on this e-mail. If you have received this message in error, please contact the sender immediately and irrevocably delete this message and any copies. On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 11:42 AM, fonzo14 [thomas\_mahier@yahoo.fr](mailto:thomas_mahier@yahoo.fr) wrote: > Hi, > > I guess many of us are deploying elasticsearch on EC2 or plan to do it. It > would be great if some ES experts can give us some hints on how to choose > the EC2 instance types. > > I know, price is the first parameter to consider. But still, they are many > options on how to spend our money : x strong box vs 2x less strong box ? > RAM vs CPU ? EBS ? I guess, it depends on the usage (facets ...). > > For example, What would you recommend ? A 4 node cluster with 32Go ram > instances or a 7 node cluster with 16 Go ram instances ? > > If any of you have some recommendations to give ... > > Thanks. > > -- -- ---
**Author:** ![karmi](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/karmi/32/44951_2.png) [@karmi](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/karmi)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 11:25am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-on-ec2-what-kind-of-instance-types-to-use/9918/3 "2012-12-04T11:25:10Z")
> Hi, > > first, as you suggest, it really, really depends on what you want to do > with elasticsearch 🙂 There's no generic "optimal configuration". With that > in mind, I can share my experiences: > > - It does not matter _that_ much if you have many weak boxes or less > strong boxes. What counts is the amount of RAM you'll be using for your use > case, and you can spread that amount as you wish. > > - Obviously, the less boxes you have, the less networking overhead you > generate, which may affect you. In general, I always preffered "less > stronger boxes", but everyone's mileage varies. > > - In the "more weaker boxes" approach, you're able to scale by adding less > capacity, which may be financially more attractive. > > - I wouldn't go below `m1.xlarge` (15GB RAM) for a serious cluster with > lots of faceting, sorting, etc. > > - `m1.2xlarge` (34.2GB) boxes perform really well, they have a serious > drawback, though: they can't use the high I/O (IOPS) EBS volumes, which are > a great fit for ES, making everything from index loading to searching > snappy. `m1.xlarge` and `m2.4xlarge` support them, see > [http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types](http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types). > > - When you have multiple boxes, make 100% sure you have some automated > configuration management such as Puppet, Chef, etc in place. You'll need to > synchronize configs on the boxes, run commands on them, etc. See the > [https://github.com/karmi/cookbook-elasticsearch](https://github.com/karmi/cookbook-elasticsearch) cookbook for Chef. > > - Make absolutely sure you're using a recent Java version -- the versions > on the AMIs provided by Amazon are outdated by couple of years in some > cases, so update your packages and install a newer one. > > Karel -- ---
**Author:** ![karmi](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/karmi/32/44951_2.png) [@karmi](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/karmi)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 11:25am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-on-ec2-what-kind-of-instance-types-to-use/9918/4 "2012-12-04T11:25:58Z")
> If you allow me to be so free: would a 14 node cluster with just 8GB of > RAM be interesting (m1.large)? Or even a 28 node cluster with 4GB > (m1.medium)? Why would you prefer that to less stronger boxes? Financially, it's all the same in AWS, you pay for resources used, not for instances per se. Karel -- ---
**Author:** ![Daniel\_Weitzenfeld](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/daniel_weitzenfeld/32/2593_2.png) [@Daniel\_Weitzenfeld](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Daniel_Weitzenfeld)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 3:51pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-on-ec2-what-kind-of-instance-types-to-use/9918/5 "2012-12-04T15:51:56Z")
I'm curious about the CPU vs memory thing, because I was surprised when I saw this high CPU, low MEM usage pattern for ES: PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM 26320 elastics 20 0 1565m 439m 3632 S 89.4 11.7 This is on an m1.medium. Also, this is while I'm bombarding the thing with queries in order to warm it up, maybe that's why...? On Tuesday, December 4, 2012 6:25:58 AM UTC-5, Karel Minařík wrote: > If you allow me to be so free: would a 14 node cluster with just 8GB of > > > RAM be interesting (m1.large)? Or even a 28 node cluster with 4GB > > (m1.medium)? > > Why would you prefer that to less stronger boxes? Financially, it's all > the same in AWS, you pay for resources used, not for instances per se. > > Karel -- ---
**Author:** ![radu\_gheorghe](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/radu_gheorghe/32/556_2.png) [@radu\_gheorghe](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/radu_gheorghe)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2012, 5:37pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-on-ec2-what-kind-of-instance-types-to-use/9918/6 "2012-12-04T17:37:23Z")
Hello, It depends on the amount of data and how it looks like, plus the queries, filters or facets. And also on how often indexing and search operations are done. Indexing is usually very CPU and IO bound. But doing lots of faceting and filtering will eat memory. Facets usually load fields and/or IDs in memory, and filters are mostly cached. Then there are field caches - the more data you have, the more memory you'll need. As you can see, most of the memory usage is for performance reasons, and that's usually a good thing. And most of them are configurable, especially the caches. If I'd have to choose on memory vs CPU vs IO performance, I'd take a subset of the production data on a small test cluster and do some performance testing (again, with what I'd expect for production), while monitoring the ES cluster. Then, I should have an idea of which resources are needed more, but not before tuning the ES configuration to fit my needs. ## Best regards, Radu [http://sematext.com/](http://sematext.com/) -- Elasticsearch -- Solr -- Lucene On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 5:51 PM, Daniel Weitzenfeld [dweitzenfeld@gmail.com](mailto:dweitzenfeld@gmail.com)wrote: > I'm curious about the CPU vs memory thing, because I was surprised when I > saw this high CPU, low MEM usage pattern for ES: > > PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM > > 26320 elastics 20 0 1565m 439m 3632 S 89.4 11.7 > > This is on an m1.medium. > > Also, this is while I'm bombarding the thing with queries in order to warm > it up, maybe that's why...? > > On Tuesday, December 4, 2012 6:25:58 AM UTC-5, Karel Minařík wrote: > > > If you allow me to be so free: would a 14 node cluster with just 8GB of > > > > > RAM be interesting (m1.large)? Or even a 28 node cluster with 4GB > > > (m1.medium)? > > > > Why would you prefer that to less stronger boxes? Financially, it's all > > the same in AWS, you pay for resources used, not for instances per se. > > > > Karel > > -- -- ---
**Author:** ![fonzo14](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/898d66/32.png) [@fonzo14](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/fonzo14)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2012, 8:10pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-on-ec2-what-kind-of-instance-types-to-use/9918/7 "2012-12-05T20:10:05Z")
Thanks for your recommendations. It's very helpful. -- ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\ **Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 3:01am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-on-ec2-what-kind-of-instance-types-to-use/9918/8 "2017-07-06T03:01:11Z")