Yes, we recommend to use PIT instead of scroll for all cases as per these instructions . And we don't recommend to use scroll any more.
As for advantages of using PIT over scroll there are several:
- a little less more memory usage. Each scroll stores a search request, as it is per request based. PIT is point in time index, so it doesn't store search requests, thus more search requests can be run at the same time.
- more resilient, if a node with goes down during a series of PIT requests, an attempt will be made to make it on another node
- PIT slices should be faster as it based on internal Lucene _doc ids rather than Elasticsearch doc _id field.
- PIT is a new API that we plan to support for very long, while we may deprecate _scroll.