# General questions about ingest

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/general-questions-about-ingest/66265>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [November 16, 2016, 4:23pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/general-questions-about-ingest/66265 "2016-11-16T16:23:59Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![pdesoyres](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/pdesoyres/32/509_2.png) [@pdesoyres](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/pdesoyres)\
**Post date:** [November 16, 2016, 4:23pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/general-questions-about-ingest/66265/1 "2016-11-16T16:23:59Z")

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I have general questions about the ingest feature in elasticsearch.

My need is to add several informations to the documents I index. Those informations are taken from external services reachable through REST APIs. I need to call many services, each of them will add one or more fields to my document. Each services can take a long time to execute.

I wanted to know if ingest feature is designed for performing such a long process.  
Does the ingest pipeline execution is blocking or is it done in background ?  
Can I write a custom ingest processor plugin that will perform the call to a REST API ?

_Pierre_

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**Author:** ![dadoonet](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/dadoonet/32/137187_2.png) [@dadoonet](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/dadoonet)\
**Post date:** [November 16, 2016, 4:55pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/general-questions-about-ingest/66265/2 "2016-11-16T16:55:46Z")

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Not really designed for that but I started a similar experience some months ago by running searches from an ingest processor.  
This went pretty well but as you said if the service takes a looooong time to answer it will somehow block ingest nodes.

You can see a similar effort here: [https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/20340](https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/20340)

I'd be super careful in writing such a component like Simon said at [https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/20340#issuecomment-245064831](https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/20340#issuecomment-245064831)

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**Author:** ![pdesoyres](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/pdesoyres/32/509_2.png) [@pdesoyres](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/pdesoyres)\
**Post date:** [November 16, 2016, 5:46pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/general-questions-about-ingest/66265/3 "2016-11-16T17:46:15Z")

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Thank you David,

this is very clear. I understand why it is not a good option.

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [December 14, 2016, 5:46pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/general-questions-about-ingest/66265/4 "2016-12-14T17:46:37Z")

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