# Getting consistent scoring best practices **URL:** \ **Category:** Elasticsearch\ **Created:** [November 11, 2019, 1:44pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/getting-consistent-scoring-best-practices/207359 "2019-11-11T13:44:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![usteidj](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ee59a6/32.png) [@usteidj](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/usteidj)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2019, 1:44pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/getting-consistent-scoring-best-practices/207359/1 "2019-11-11T13:44:50Z")
I've had the case that's described in the "Scores are not reproducible" section of this: [Getting consistent scoring](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/master/consistent-scoring.html). I am using the ElasticSearch Service in AWS. I'm going to have a large index (millions of documents), but right now, I only have about 16K. The pipeline replaces existing documents by doing a delete\_by\_query and a refresh before adding replacements (some would be overwritten, some would be deleted and some would be added). Along with doing the delete\_by\_query and refresh, I've got `"gc_deletes" : 0` set in the index. I don't know how often it will happen, but I've already seen one occurrence where I run the exact same search multiple times and I either get one result set where the top score is one thing (and the documents are ordered according to it) or another thing (and documents are ordered likewise). Now, I don't really have the opportunity to place a "session" identifier in the preference value - I could always place the same value (something like "abc123) in that field, but to me that seems like it might be a problem because every search that will come in will have that exact same identifier. Is that indeed a problem? Would using the dfs\_query\_then \_fetch handle this problem? There's a note I saw in one of the ElasticSearch documentation articles that said that it shouldn't be used in production. Finally, is there a strategy to prevent the root cause from presenting itself in the first place, or at least greatly reduce the likelihood? I was wondering whether I need to run a \_forcemerge on a regular basis to make sure all deletes are not taken into consideration when scoring happens? Thanks for any guidance. ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2019, 1:44pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/getting-consistent-scoring-best-practices/207359/2 "2019-12-09T13:44:56Z")
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