How long it takes to update an alias?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
#1

I'm frequently (several times per second) updating alias on my ES 2.3.1 cluster. The index has 5 shards and the alias definition example is here: http://pastebin.com/raw/vZriWFFS

I notice that it takes 300-500 milliseconds for "PUT alias" operation to complete, which is rather long. Is this an expected behaviour? Is there a way to speed it up?

#2

Each change to an alias requires the cluster state to be updated and propagated across the cluster, so this type of frequent updates will cause a fair bit of overhead. It sounds like you are abusing aliases in a way they were not necessarily designed for. What is the problem you are trying to solve by using aliases in this way?

#3

We want certain set of documents to be visible only when we complete loading the whole set. So we do queries against aliases only and update aliases to mask-out/in setids that are in progress.

#4