Took vs profile API time_in_nanos

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

I have a query that I run and it says:
{
"took": 1
...
}

And then when I tack on "profile": true

It shows me the top-level query (which is inclusive of all children from what I read) has a response of:
{
"time": "6.6ms",
"time_in_nanos": 6610556
...
}

What's the difference and why does profile say my query takes longer, but took says shorter?

2

Hi,

in the docs we state:

The Profile API is a debugging tool and adds significant overhead to search execution.

So the difference is likely caused by the profile API itself.

Daniel

3

Yep, @danielmitterdorfer is exactly correct. Profiling adds a fair amount of overhead, so all profiling results should be considered relative (e.g. the different parts in the query relative to each other), not absolute times.