# Wrong values in \_count API in ES 5.3.0?
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/wrong-values-in--count-api-in-es-5-3-0/82348
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [April 13, 2017, 7:33pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/wrong-values-in--count-api-in-es-5-3-0/82348 "2017-04-13T19:33:25Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@mkelkar](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/mkelkar)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 7:33pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/wrong-values-in--count-api-in-es-5-3-0/82348/1 "2017-04-13T19:33:25Z")
Hi There,
I am using ES 5.3.0. I have indexed about 2.2M documents in my index, and it seems like count API is returning results that are far too different than \_cat/indices API..is there something wrong?
```
curl localhost:9200/_cat/indices?v
health status index pri rep docs.count docs.deleted store.size pri.store.size
green open index1 6 2 172544 0 384.7mb 128.2mb
green open index2 6 2 2708259 74040 6.8gb 2.1gb
$ curl localhost:9200/index1/_count?pretty
{
"count" : 84916,
"_shards" : {
"total" : 6,
"successful" : 6,
"failed" : 0
}
}
$ curl localhost:9200/index2/_count?pretty
{
"count" : 1027782,
"_shards" : {
"total" : 6,
"successful" : 6,
"failed" : 0
}
}
```
Thanks
Madhav.
---
### Author:  [@leom](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/leom)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 8:26pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/wrong-values-in--count-api-in-es-5-3-0/82348/2 "2017-04-13T20:26:32Z")
Looks like you have 2 replica shards for each of your indices. I would initially guess that the \_count API returns the number of primary documents, and the \_cat/indices API returns total # of documents including replicas.
That would only make sense if you were still inserting documents in between you \_cat/indices query and your \_count queries (since 3 X 80K = 240k != 170k; but maybe when you made the \_cat/indices query you actually have like 65K primary documents). Is that the case?
---
### Author:  [@leom](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/leom)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 8:32pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/wrong-values-in--count-api-in-es-5-3-0/82348/3 "2017-04-13T20:32:29Z")
According to [cat indices | Elasticsearch Guide [5.3] | Elastic](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/5.3/cat-indices.html)
> We can tell quickly how many shards make up an index, the number of docs at the Lucene level, including hidden docs (e.g., from nested types), deleted docs, primary store size, and total store size (all shards including replicas). All these exposed metrics come directly from Lucene APIs.
It does sound like the cat query returns primary + replica documents (since it's # docs at the Lucene level).
---
### Author:  [@mkelkar](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/mkelkar)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2017, 9:22pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/wrong-values-in--count-api-in-es-5-3-0/82348/4 "2017-04-13T21:22:54Z")
@leom interesting read about stats coming from lucene. However, I do see that in ES 1.7, both the count and cat apis return the same value
```
curl localhost:9200/_cat/indices?v
health status index pri rep docs.count docs.deleted store.size pri.store.size
green open &shared-apple-apple 6 2 2201729 851343 10.7gb 3.5gb
curl 'localhost:9200/&shared-apple-apple/_count?pretty'
{
"count" : 2201729,
"_shards" : {
"total" : 6,
"successful" : 6,
"failed" : 0
}
}
```
Not sure if the semantics changed in 5.X...
---
### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [May 11, 2017, 9:34pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/wrong-values-in--count-api-in-es-5-3-0/82348/5 "2017-05-11T21:34:46Z")
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