Using _msearch with suggesters only?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

I have to query several completion suggesters at the same time. This is
easy to do using the _suggest api.

However if I want to query multiple suggesters on different indexes I have
two choices:

  1. Perform multiple http requests using the _suggest api
  2. Use the _msearch api.

I am currently using option 1 which appears to perform reasonably well so
far however I would like to only perform a single request if possible so I
have been playing with the _msearch api.

The problem is when performin a single _msearch request for multiple
suggesters on multiple indexes, each index also ends up getting queried,
return all the hits as though I had also queried with matchall : {}

In order to minimize this issue I have set the size parameter to 0 which
prevents the hits from being returned. However I still get a total count
returned for all the documents in each index.

This implies to me that Elasticsearch is still doing some unnecessary work
matching and counting documents in each index when all I really want
returned are the suggestions.

  • Is Elasticsearch actually performing any work other than for the
    suggesters?
  • If so is there another way to return suggestion from multiple
    completion suggesters across several indices in a single request without
    querying at all?
  • Would using _msearch in this manner be considered a better practice
    than performing two or more _suggest calls in parallel?

My request currently looks like this:

var request = [{
index: 'users',
type: 'user'
},
{
size : 0,
suggest: {
users_suggest: {
text: term,
completion: {
size : 5,
field: 'users_suggest'
}
}
}
},
{
index: 'photos',
type: 'photo'
},
{
size : 0,
suggest : {
tags_suggest: {
text: term,
completion: {
size : 3,
field: 'tags_suggest'
}
},
place_suggest: {
text: term,
completion: {
size : 3,
field: 'place_suggest'
}
},
country_suggest: {
text: term,
completion: {
size : 3,
field: 'country_suggest'
}
}
}
}];

And the results I am getting returned are as follows :

[{
"took": 8,
"timed_out": false,
"_shards": {
"total": 5,
"successful": 5,
"failed": 0
},
"hits": {
"total": 28,
"max_score": 0,
"hits": []
},
"suggest": {
"users_suggest": [{
"text": "t",
"offset": 0,
"length": 1,
"options": [suggestions]
}]
}
}, {
"took": 8,
"timed_out": false,
"_shards": {
"total": 5,
"successful": 5,
"failed": 0
},
"hits": {
"total": 117,
"max_score": 0,
"hits": []
},
"suggest": {
"country_suggest": [{
"text": "t",
"offset": 0,
"length": 1,
"options": []
}],
"place_suggest": [suggestions]
}],
"tags_suggest": [suggestions]
}]
}
}]

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