Slowness in Performance of ElasticSearch/Kibana

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

I am running elasticsearch and kibana at V9.2.0:

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and have datasets that are very small:

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I am using edge with Kibana and I notice as more documents have been loaded that I can refresh the webpage (using edge refresh button) and it can take up to 30-45s to load the page again. It never used to take this long.

The server is linuxmint pretty fully uptodate running in VMware workstation 17.5 with 4 CPUs and 32GB of RAM. The laptop features a 13700H with 96GB of RAM and 990 Pro SSDs. I was not expecting this slowdown so early on. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on this ?

What I have done is load the following settings for JVM this afternoon:

-Xms8g
-Xmx8g
-XX:+UseG1GC
-XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=200
-XX:InitiatingHeapOccupancyPercent=30
-XX:G1HeapRegionSize=4m
-XX:ConcGCThreads=2
-XX:ParallelGCThreads=4
-XX:+UseStringDeduplication
-XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions
-XX:G1ReservePercent=15
-XX:+AlwaysPreTouch

and restarted elasticsearch. I was wondering if anyone has any ideas for performance improvement over and above what has been tried. It is probably too soon to know if these changes above are worthwhile but I’m thinking the use of the G1GC might be the main thing of benefit here.

Geoffrey Brown, Te Puke, NZ.

2

Hi @geoffrey

Apologies,

It's not clear what the actual issue is..

Exactly what page are you loading / refreshing?

Are you running Discover?

Are you just talking Loading Kibana home page

Are you searching documents?

Is Kibana on the same host?

If you try Firefox are you seeing the same thing?

3

So Im just doing some pie charts and graphs from the timeframe 22 Sep till now so will be retrieving date from the dmarc_aggregate-2025-09 (3k/1.4MB) and dmarc_aggregate-2025-10 (8k/2.4MB) indexes. The output is below:

If I click the edge refresh button (not the refresh in kibana) then this is where I can get the delay redrawing the screen. Its a custom dashboard with nothing too exceptional going on in my opinion:

Screenshot 2025-10-30 195724 V2
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Yes just loading Kibana dashboard I have created. Yes to document searching as there is an ES|QL query at top that selects a subset of the data and the tables also have columns that are not displayed but effectively filter the data I am interested in. Very basic however.

On the linux desktop all looks normal:

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I will try firefox tomorrow for viewing and changing dashboard in Kibana and see how it goes. I just tried edge and firefox now and both are responsive. The delay was happening occasionally in edge (the 30-45s). Not all the time. When updates to the dmarc indexes happen it will typically be <10 docs added. The worst number of documents added to an index at one time would be 350 - small numbers.

Many thanks…

Geoffrey.

4

Since you’re running a single node cluster many things will not go as planned.

  • Can you return cluster health api ?

The truth is it shouldnt matters for a small dataset like this, but let’s try to focus on potential overheads limits.

  • VM itself what is writing / using IO
  • How is the storage configured ?
    • Hardware SSD (AHCI, TRIM and guest OS config)
    • VM configuration
    • Virtualized System configuration

You should try to play with fio utility and check if you have abnormal values for SSDs i’ve ran countless lab clusters on 990s Pro and shouldnt be an issue :wink:

5

I think for cluster health this is what you are wanting ?

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Hardware SSD is Samsung 990 Pro 4TB x 2. Using the second (non OS) drive for VM. In Linux disk appears as ext4:

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FIO write test (the takeaway seems to be ~1.3GB/s):

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And for reads seems to me to get 1.4GB/s:

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uname -a:

Linux linuxmint 6.8.0-85-generic #85-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu Sep 18 15:26:59 UTC 2025 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Does that help @grumo35 ?

Many thanks…

6

Hi @geoffrey

I'm still a bit confused whether you're saying that reloading the entire Kibana app is slow since you're running a refresh on edge..

Or you're saying when you refresh your dashboard it's slow..

The first is all about pulling down the whole kibana app, Not really my expertise

With chrome or Firefox you can open the dev tools and see what's taking the longest from the network and load and render perspective.

The second just refreshing the dashboard is about how long the queries take, which you can inspect the queries and see which ones are taking long and you could even put them in the profiler.