# What is the bottleneck of elasticsearch? What gives the greatest performance boosts?

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-bottleneck-of-elasticsearch-what-gives-the-greatest-performance-boosts/243880>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [August 5, 2020, 2:24pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-bottleneck-of-elasticsearch-what-gives-the-greatest-performance-boosts/243880 "2020-08-05T14:24:12Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 7\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![defalt](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/defalt/32/71379_2.png) [@defalt](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/defalt)\
**Post date:** [August 5, 2020, 2:24pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-bottleneck-of-elasticsearch-what-gives-the-greatest-performance-boosts/243880/1 "2020-08-05T14:24:13Z")

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Hi,  
its a general question: What limits elasticsearch the most? Lets say we have a normal node with:

- i5, 4 Cores
- 32GB, DDR4 Ram
- 2TB SSD

What will give me the greates performance boost when I change these components? Lets say I change the i5 for a i9 with 8 cores will it boost performance as much as for example 64GB of ram? Do cores have a big impact on elasticsearch? Or is the SSD performance important and you should get the fastest SSD there is?

Thanks,  
_defalt_

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**Author:** ![Christian\_Dahlqvist](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/christian_dahlqvist/32/4617_2.png) [@Christian\_Dahlqvist](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Christian_Dahlqvist)\
**Post date:** [August 5, 2020, 3:20pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-bottleneck-of-elasticsearch-what-gives-the-greatest-performance-boosts/243880/2 "2020-08-05T15:20:54Z")

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It depend on the use case and workload and what happens to be limiting performance. There is no one size fits all answer.

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**Author:** ![defalt](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/defalt/32/71379_2.png) [@defalt](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/defalt)\
**Post date:** [August 6, 2020, 5:24am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-bottleneck-of-elasticsearch-what-gives-the-greatest-performance-boosts/243880/3 "2020-08-06T05:24:17Z")

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Does the number of cores matter a lot?

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**Author:** ![Steve\_Mushero](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/steve_mushero/32/22441_2.png) [@Steve\_Mushero](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Steve_Mushero)\
**Post date:** [August 6, 2020, 6:17am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-bottleneck-of-elasticsearch-what-gives-the-greatest-performance-boosts/243880/4 "2020-08-06T06:17:00Z")

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Personal, totally uninformed opinion, is that in nearly all data systems, RAM matters most, followed by disk latency/parallelism, finally by CPU - but of course there are loads that violate this, such as heavy inbound or query processing that need CPU, etc. and that any particular of the there factors is only maybe 1/2 important, i.e. it takes a balance.

But more RAM is never bad (up to ES 32GB limits).

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**Author:** ![begin](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/begin/32/98916_2.png) [@begin](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/begin)\
**Post date:** [August 6, 2020, 6:59am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-bottleneck-of-elasticsearch-what-gives-the-greatest-performance-boosts/243880/5 "2020-08-06T06:59:40Z")

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The following document says this.

> The quantity and performance of CPU cores governs the average speed and peak throughput of data operations in Elasticsearch.

> **[elasticsearch-sizing-and-capacity-planning.pdf](https://www.elastic.co/pdf/elasticsearch-sizing-and-capacity-planning.pdf)**

I hope this is helpful.

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**Author:** ![defalt](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/defalt/32/71379_2.png) [@defalt](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/defalt)\
**Post date:** [August 6, 2020, 1:37pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-bottleneck-of-elasticsearch-what-gives-the-greatest-performance-boosts/243880/6 "2020-08-06T13:37:33Z")

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Thanks, sounds useful.

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [September 3, 2020, 1:37pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/what-is-the-bottleneck-of-elasticsearch-what-gives-the-greatest-performance-boosts/243880/7 "2020-09-03T13:37:35Z")

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