Why does the field docs.deleted count returns as zero in elasticsearch _cat/indices API response?

[Santu (Jose pal)]

Hey,

I am using elasticsearch 5.X version. and i have created an index along with some documents.

POST /_bulk
{ "index" : { "_index" : "index-a", "_type" : "type-a", "_id" : "1" } }
{ "field" : "value1" }
{ "create" : { "_index" : "index-a", "_type" : "type-a", "_id" : "2" } }

and after that i have deleted 1 document from the above index.
DELETE index-a/type-a/2

when i perform http://localhost:xxxx/_cat/indices?v then it returns me docs.deleted count as 0 (zero)

why?. any suggestions on this would be appreciated.

[spinscale (Alexander Reelsen)]

Is it possible that you executed a force merge before testing this?

POST /_bulk
{ "index" : { "_index" : "index-a", "_type" : "type-a", "_id" : "1" } }
{ "field" : "value1" }
{ "create" : { "_index" : "index-a", "_type" : "type-a", "_id" : "2" } }

DELETE index-a/type-a/2

# shows deleted document
GET /_cat/indices/index-a?v

POST index-a/_flush?force

# no more deleted document
GET /_cat/indices/index-a?v

[Santu (Jose pal)]

Thanks @spinscale for response.

No. but still the result is same before and after the force merge.

[spinscale (Alexander Reelsen)]

is there potentially another background process triggering this? Out of curiosity, why do you think this is a problem?

[Santu (Jose pal)]

exactly i'm not very sure if there is any other background process is preventing this from fetching the actual results. but i tested it on my local machine only.

actually i'm expecting some docs deleted count for that index at index level.

[Santu (Jose pal)]

@spinscale, can you also please elaborate what does docs.deleted count means?

[spinscale (Alexander Reelsen)]

docs.deleted is the count of documents marked as deleted, which will be physically removed from disk at some point in the future when merging happens.