If scrolling isn't recommended for user requests, what to use?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

When a user needs to get all instances of a field matching /cars/123, I use search for retrieving the results with a maximum result of 10,000. I can see the number of hits easily exceeding ten thousand, so I've started looking into scroll. However, https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-request-scroll.html mentions the following:

Scrolling is not intended for real time user requests, but rather for processing large amounts of data, e.g. in order to reindex the contents of one index into a new index with a different configuration.

If scrolling isn't recommended for user requests, then what should I use for get all the results? Is there another way to query without limiting the maximum number of results returned?

2

No, there isn't another way. Scrolling is probably the thing you want to use if you really want to do it. But you've found a thing that Elasticsearch doesn't like doing very much. To us, getting all the documents for a user request is a use case we barely support. We push people to use aggregations if they want to do things across many many documents because that is much faster.

Usually for a search use case you limit the depth you allow users to search. Like this or this. The last one actually uses Elasticsearch....