Opster Team
Before you begin reading this guide, we recommend you run Elasticsearch Error Check-Up which analyzes 2 JSON files to detect many errors.
Briefly, this error message indicates that the maximum content length for a request is set to a high value. The maximum content length controls the size of requests that can be processed by Elasticsearch. To resolve the issue, the maximum content length should be set to an appropriate value.
To easily locate the root cause and resolve this issue try AutoOps for Elasticsearch & OpenSearch. It diagnoses problems by analyzing hundreds of metrics collected by a lightweight agent and offers guidance for resolving them.
This guide will help you check for common problems that cause the log ” MaxContentLength set to high value; resetting it to 100mb ” to appear. To understand the issues related to this log, read the explanation below about the following Elasticsearch concepts: rest-high-level.
Overview
Rest-high-level is built on top of low-level rest-client and is a method of communicating with Elasticsearch based on HTTP REST endpoints. This concept is majorly popular in the context of a Java-based Elasticsearch client. From day one, Elasticsearch supports transport clients for Java to communicate with Elasticsearch. In version 5.0, a low-level rest-client was released with lots of advantages over the existing transport client such as version independencies, increased stability, and lightweight JAR file libraries.
What it is used for
It is used for communicating with Elasticsearch HTTP REST endpoints in which marshalling and unmarshalling of response objects are handled by the Elasticsearch server itself.

Log Context
Log “MaxContentLength[{}] set to high value; resetting it to [100mb]” classname is Netty4HttpServerTransport.java.
We extracted the following from Elasticsearch source code for those seeking an in-depth context :
this.pipeliningMaxEvents = SETTING_PIPELINING_MAX_EVENTS.get(settings); this.corsConfig = buildCorsConfig(settings); // validate max content length if (maxContentLength.getBytes() > Integer.MAX_VALUE) { logger.warn("maxContentLength[{}] set to high value; resetting it to [100mb]"; maxContentLength); deprecationLogger.deprecated( "out of bounds max content length value [{}] will no longer be truncated to [100mb]; you must enter a valid setting"; maxContentLength.getStringRep()); maxContentLength = new ByteSizeValue(100; ByteSizeUnit.MB); }
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Lourens Rozema
CTO at Omnidots