# Tweaking query to avoid "too\_many\_clauses"

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/tweaking-query-to-avoid-too-many-clauses/88089>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [June 2, 2017, 1:49pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/tweaking-query-to-avoid-too-many-clauses/88089 "2017-06-02T13:49:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Alex5](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3e96dc/32.png) [@Alex5](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Alex5)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2017, 1:49pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/tweaking-query-to-avoid-too-many-clauses/88089/1 "2017-06-02T13:49:05Z")

</div>

Hello,

I'm having some issues as to where a query is failing due to too many clauses and was wondering if there were optimizations I could do to keep my data as-is but make the query successful. My data consists of 2 indices: `contracts` and `products` where:

1. A contract is a customer code and a list of product codes available to that customer
2. Products are a product code along with all the metadata (description, price, etc.)

A contract, once indexed might look like this:

```auto
      {
        "_index": "contracts",
        "_type": "customer",
        "_id": "1-000001",
        "_score": 1,
        "_source": {
          "product_id": [
            1,
            2,
            3,
          ],
          "customer_code": "00001"
        }
      }

```

So I query the products index with the following:

```auto
GET products/_search
{
  "query": {
    "terms": {
      "id": {
        "index": "contract",
        "type": "customer",
        "path": "product_id",
        "id": "1-000001"
      }
    }
  }
}

```

which works fine when the `product_id` array on the contract is small but some contracts have a lot of products (2000+) at which point the query fails. Even when the number of products is _small enough_ for the query to execute properly it is still quite slow.

In short what I'm trying to do is query the `products` index and say "give me all the products in this contract". Anybody with an idea on how to improve this? Thanks!

Note: We recently upgraded from an old (pre 1.0) version of ES to 5.1.1 and we had a similar query working as a terms filter which seemed to ignore the max clause while terms query do not.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [June 30, 2017, 1:49pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/tweaking-query-to-avoid-too-many-clauses/88089/2 "2017-06-30T13:49:41Z")

</div>

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