existsAlias returns false

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi,

Using RestHighLevelClient with Elasticsearch 7.17.7 both client and server.
For new records coming in I check wether an expected alias exists.

boolean exists = client.indices().existsAlias(requestWithAlias, RequestOptions.DEFAULT);

At times I can see this API return false for an alias that was created long ago. This can even happen with 2 almost consecutive calls with just a second or so in between.

An example from my own logs (truncated logs):

7:30:59.141 AM alias exists
7:31:01.279 AM alias does not exist

According to the documentation:

In cases where the server returns a 4xx or 5xx error code, the high-level client tries to parse the response body error details instead and then throws a generic ElasticsearchException and adds the original ResponseException as a suppressed exception to it.

But because there was no exception, I assume that some code other than 200 was returned (looking into the Java code, 200 will return true otherwise false - so I guess a 404 was returned but I don't know for sure).

I was thinking perhaps there was a timeout, but shouldn't this have resulted in an exception?

I can also see some logs from ES mentioning memory from time to time (not necessarily adjacent to the example above):

attempting to trigger G1GC due to high heap usage

followed by:

GC did bring memory usage down

Any idea why existsAlias sometimes returns false for an alias that exists for sure?

2

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