Highlighting performance issues with stored field and fvh highlighter

jsfi · February 14, 2024, 8:12am

Hello,

I'm having a very similar issue to Elastic query takes over 1 minute due to time spent in "HighlightPhase"

I have documents with an optional attachments text field that for some documents can be quite big (up to 20 MB).

I have a query that searches for a match in the title field and highlights this field. If the query matches only smaller documents, the whole query takes 30ms maximum (measured in the Kibana Dev Tools). If I match many larger documents, the same query takes over 1s.

The highlighted field is stored.

The simplified query:

{
  "profile": true, 
  "from": 0,
  "size": 20,
  "query": {
    "bool": {
      "filter": [
        {
          "terms": {
            "_id": [
              /* 20 ids of documents with either large or small attachments
            ]
          }
        }
      ],
      "should": [
        {
          "simple_query_string": {
            "query": "cat",
            "fields": [
              "title"
            ]
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  },
  "highlight": {
    "fields": {
      "title": {
        "type": "fvh"
      }
    }
  },
  "_source": false
}

The mapping of the title field:

"title": {
  "type": "text",
  "store": true,
  "fields": {
    "direct": {
      "type": "text",
      "term_vector": "with_positions_offsets",
      "analyzer": "german_simple"
    },
    "exact": {
      "type": "text",
      "term_vector": "with_positions_offsets",
      "analyzer": "german_exact"
    },
    "suggest": {
      "type": "text",
      "term_vector": "with_positions_offsets",
      "analyzer": "german_trigram_search_suggests"
    }
  },
  "term_vector": "with_positions_offsets",
  "analyzer": "german_decompound"
},

The additional time is completely spent in the "HighlightPhase":

"Fast" documents:

{
  "type": "HighlightPhase",
  "description": "",
  "time_in_nanos": 10123678,
  "breakdown": {
    "process_count": 10,
    "process": 10119747,
    "next_reader": 3931,
    "next_reader_count": 5
  }
},
...
{
  "type": "HighlightPhase",
  "description": "",
  "time_in_nanos": 10709348,
  "breakdown": {
    "process_count": 10,
    "process": 10705987,
    "next_reader": 3361,
    "next_reader_count": 4
  }
},

"Slow" documents:

{
  "type": "HighlightPhase",
  "description": "",
  "time_in_nanos": 900147051,
  "breakdown": {
    "process_count": 11,
    "process": 900142684,
    "next_reader": 4367,
    "next_reader_count": 5
  }
},
...
{
  "type": "HighlightPhase",
  "description": "",
  "time_in_nanos": 657357947,
  "breakdown": {
    "process_count": 9,
    "process": 657355378,
    "next_reader": 2569,
    "next_reader_count": 3
  }
},

Any pointers and ideas are much appreciated. Thanks for your attention.

jsfi · February 14, 2024, 1:15pm

Sorry, I forgot. I'm on Elasticsearch version 8.12.1. I was on 8.10.4 when I noticed the problem and an update to the latest available version did not change this behavior.

leandrojmp · February 14, 2024, 1:58pm

There seems to be some issue with the highlighting as you can see in this similar post.

There are some github issues linked, mainly this one:

github.com/elastic/elasticsearch

Highlighting can take 50% to 99% of search time

opened 08:59PM - 11 Dec 23 UTC

quux00

>bug :Search/Highlighting Team:Search

### Elasticsearch Version 8.10.4 and 8.13.0-SNAPSHOT ### Installed Plugins… _No response_ ### Java Version _bundled_ ### OS Version ESS Cloud and MacOS ### Problem Description A customer has reported that highlighting (added by Kibana) is causing their queries in Kibana to extremely slowly. Profiling of the queries showed that 99% of the search time is spent in the Highlight code paths. In their case, the ConstantScoreQuery took less than 1 second, but the highlighting runs for ~850s (this is reproducible). I was able to reproduce this to some degree locally (details below), where a the highlighting takes ~50% of the total search time. Root cause is not known. Key points include: - the query being run (by Kibana) is a match_phrase against `match_only_text`. ### Steps to Reproduce Here is how I (partially) reproduced the issue locally. Use the following mapping to crate an index where `message` has `match_only_text` and 1 shard is created (I didn't test with more than 1 shard). <details> <summary>Mapping (toggle to view)</summary> <pre> { "settings": { "index" : { "number_of_shards": 1, "number_of_replicas": 0 } }, "mappings": { "properties": { "@timestamp": { "type": "date" }, "message": { "type": "match_only_text" }, "kubernetes": { "properties": { "container": { "properties": { "name": { "type": "keyword", "ignore_above": 1024 } } }, "daemonset": { "properties": { "name": { "type": "keyword", "ignore_above": 1024 } } }, "deployment": { "properties": { "name": { "type": "keyword", "ignore_above": 1024 } } } } }, "bytes_sent": { "type": "long" }, "content_type": { "type": "text", "fields": { "keyword": { "type": "keyword", "ignore_above": 256 } } }, "geoip_location_lat": { "type": "float" }, "geoip_location_lon": { "type": "float" }, "is_https": { "type": "boolean" }, "request": { "type": "text", "fields": { "keyword": { "type": "keyword", "ignore_above": 256 } } }, "response": { "type": "long" }, "runtime_ms": { "type": "long" }, "url": { "type": "keyword" }, "user_Agent": { "type": "text", "fields": { "keyword": { "type": "keyword", "ignore_above": 256 } } }, "verb": { "type": "text", "fields": { "keyword": { "type": "keyword", "ignore_above": 256 } } } } } } </pre> </details> Populate this index with at least 2.5 million records in scope for the search (see my table in comments below). <details> <summary>Data generation script (toggle to view)</summary> ``` import argparse import ndjson from faker import Faker from datetime import datetime, timedelta import random def generate_fake_data(num_lines): fake = Faker() data = [] timestamp = datetime.strptime("2021-04-06T14:00:00", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S") for _ in range(num_lines): timestamp_str = timestamp.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.000Z") timestamp += timedelta(seconds=5) # Generate a message with at least 85 words message_word_count = random.randint(85, 225) message = fake.paragraph(nb_sentences=1, ext_word_list=None) while len(message.split()) < message_word_count: message += " " + fake.paragraph(nb_sentences=1, ext_word_list=None) ri = random.randint(1,4) if ri == 2: message += ". request errored 123 forty-five 12:45 foobar " + fake.word() + " " + fake.word() elif ri == 3: message = "12345 California request completed - " + message deployment_name = "service-integrations" if ri > 2: deployment_name = fake.word() json_data = { "@timestamp": timestamp_str, "user_Agent": fake.user_agent(), "url": fake.uri_path(), "content_type": fake.mime_type(), "is_https": fake.boolean(), "response": fake.random_int(min=100, max=599), "verb": fake.http_method(), "geoip_location_lon": float(fake.longitude()), "geoip_location_lat": float(fake.latitude()), "bytes_sent": fake.random_int(min=1000, max=50000), "runtime_ms": fake.random_int(min=100, max=1000), "message": message, "kubernetes": { "container": {"name": fake.word()}, "daemonset": {"name": fake.word()}, "deployment": {"name": deployment_name} } } data.append(json_data) return data def main(): parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="Generate ndjson with Faker") parser.add_argument("num_lines", type=int, help="Number of lines to produce") args = parser.parse_args() fake_data = generate_fake_data(args.num_lines + 1) output_file_name = f"sdh7687-data-{args.num_lines}.json" with open(output_file_name, "w") as f: ndjson.dump(fake_data, f, ensure_ascii=False) if __name__ == "__main__": main() ``` </details> <details> <summary>Loading script (toggle to view)</summary> ``` #!/bin/bash if [ "$#" -ne 2 ]; then echo "Usage: $0 <port> <input_file>" exit 1 fi port="$1" input="$2" output="bulk.log" counter=0 max_rows=10000 create='{"create": {}}' bulk_data=$'\n' default_port=9200 echo "Using port: $port" echo "Creating sdh7687 index with mappings to http://localhost:$port ..." /usr/bin/curl -s -XPUT "http://localhost:$port/sdh7687" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' --insecure --data-binary @sdh7687-mappings-not-match-only-text.json echo "" echo "Reading sdh7687 events from $input..." while read -r log_event do let "counter=counter+1" bulk_data+="$create"$'\n'"$log_event"$'\n' if [ $counter -eq $max_rows ] then echo "Indexing $counter documents..." bulk_data+=$'\n' echo "$bulk_data" | tee temp.json > /dev/null /usr/bin/curl -XPOST "http://localhost:$port/sdh7687/_bulk" -H 'Content-Type: application/x-ndjson' -# --progress-bar --insecure --data-binary @temp.json >> "$output" rm -rf temp.json counter=0 bulk_data=$'\n' fi done < "$input" if [ $counter -lt $max_rows ] && [ $counter -gt 0 ] then echo "Indexing $counter documents..." bulk_data+=$'\n' echo "$bulk_data" | tee temp.json > /dev/null /usr/bin/curl -XPOST "http://localhost:$port/sdh7687/_bulk" -H 'Content-Type: application/x-ndjson' -# --progress-bar --insecure --data-binary @temp.json >> "$output" rm -rf temp.json fi ``` </details> Note I ran the above two scripts dozens of times to create data files with 100,000 to 200,000 entries, so that most of the data fell within a small-ish @timestamp range to index millions of documents. Run the following query (has profiling and highlighting turned on). <details> <summary>ES Query (toggle to view)</summary> <pre> POST sdh7687/_async_search { "profile": true, "track_total_hits": false, "sort": [ { "@timestamp": { "order": "desc", "unmapped_type": "boolean" } } ], "fields": [ { "field": "*", "include_unmapped": "true" }, { "field": "@timestamp", "format": "strict_date_optional_time" } ], "size": 10, "version": true, "script_fields": {}, "stored_fields": [ "*" ], "runtime_mappings": {}, "_source": false, "query": { "bool": { "must": [], "filter": [ { "range": { "@timestamp": { "format": "strict_date_optional_time", "gte": "2021-01-02T06:40:00.000Z", "lte": "2021-04-10T06:49:07.221Z" } } }, { "match_phrase": { "kubernetes.deployment.name": "service-integrations" } } ], "should": [], "must_not": [ { "match_phrase": { "message": "request errored" } }, { "match_phrase": { "message": "request completed" } } ] } }, "highlight": { "pre_tags": [ "@kibana-highlighted-field@" ], "post_tags": [ "@/kibana-highlighted-field@" ], "fields": { "*": {} }, "fragment_size": 2147483647 } } </pre> </details> ### Logs (if relevant) _No response_

Your issue may be related to this.

system · March 13, 2024, 1:59pm

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Highlighting performance issues with stored field and fvh highlighter

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