Elasticsearch Persistent Settings - A Short Guide with Examples

Opster Team

March 2021

In addition to reading this guide, we recommend you run the Elasticsearch Health Check-Up. It will detect issues and improve your Elasticsearch performance by analyzing your shard sizes, threadpools, memory, snapshots, disk watermarks and more.

The Elasticsearch Check-Up is free and requires no installation.

Run the Elasticsearch check-up to receive recommendations like this:

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The following configuration error was detected on node 123...

Description

This error can have a severe impact on your system. It's important to understand that it was caused by...

Recommendation

In order to resolve this issue and prevent it from occurring again, we recommend that you begin by changing the configuration to...

X-PUT curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" [customized recommendation]

Overview

In Elasticsearch, persistent refers to cluster settings that persist across cluster restarts. This setting is used in Cluster Update API calls. Persistent settings can also be configured in the elasticsearch.yml file.

Examples

## enable shard routing
PUT /_cluster/settings
{
    "persistent" : {
        "cluster.routing.allocation.enable" : "all"
    }
}
## enable rebalancing of shards
PUT /_cluster/settings
{
    "persistent" : {
        "cluster.routing.rebalance.enable" : "all"
    }
}
## limit the heap size for fielddata
PUT /_cluster/settings
{
    "persistent" : {
                 “indices.breaker.fielddata.limit”: "30%"
    }
}