My scenario is the following:
i have a live index with a lot of updates that runs out of disk space at some time.
The reason is that after some time i have a lot of max size segments (5gb) but the deleted document count is below 50% → The normal merge will not touch them.
My idea is: Can i rewrite the current segments without the deleted documents to give disk space free.
Can a forcemerge with “only_expunge_deletes=true” do the trick for me? Or will this create big segments that create more problems in the future?
the documentation is quite slim on what only_expunge_deletes will really do, e.g. Force a merge | Elasticsearch API documentation
PS: i know the alternative is a complete reindex and deletion of the old index → but this is a quite ressource heavy approach
PS: The question was also asked here but nobody answered: Safe usage of `_forcemerge` with `only_expunge_deletes`