Performance impacts of track_scores on sorted queries

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi,
I'm attempting to wrap my head around what the performance hit is on queries with and without the track_scores flag flipped in the sort during queries in our ElasticSearch 6.8 cluster. Unfortunately it's pretty busy and I feel like I was unable to isolate enough variables to tease out what the performance hit actually was. I actually got the average score tracked sorted query to be faster than untracked queries, which is the opposite of what I was expecting.

Has anyone found a meaningful performance hit? Or does anyone know what the factors are with the track_scores flag and how they affect searches? Perhaps a ballpark on the % inefficiency in query time?

Thanks!

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I'm not sure testing performance stuff like that is a good idea on live servers haha -

But when sorting on a field, scores are not computed. By setting track_scores to true, scores will be computed and tracked. So there's going to be some kind of performance impact, even if it's extremely small/unnoticeable, it's going to be there.

If you were using it on live servers and getting mixed results (as in faster or equivalent searches) it's safe to say it wont impact search speed much.

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