Timed out waiting for relocation hand-off to complete – How to solve this Elasticsearch exception

Opster Team

August-23, Version: 6.8-8.9

Before you dig into reading this guide, have you tried asking OpsGPT what this log means? You’ll receive a customized analysis of your log.

Try OpsGPT now for step-by-step guidance and tailored insights into your Elasticsearch operation.

Briefly, this error occurs when Elasticsearch is unable to complete the relocation of a shard within the set timeout period. This could be due to heavy indexing or search load, network issues, or insufficient resources. To resolve this issue, you can increase the timeout period, reduce the load on the cluster, or add more resources to the cluster. Additionally, check for network issues that might be slowing down the relocation process.

For a complete solution to your to your search operation, try for free AutoOps for Elasticsearch & OpenSearch . With AutoOps and Opster’s proactive support, you don’t have to worry about your search operation – we take charge of it. Get improved performance & stability with less hardware.

This guide will help you check for common problems that cause the log ” timed out waiting for relocation hand-off to complete ” to appear. To understand the issues related to this log, read the explanation below about the following Elasticsearch concepts: shard, relocation, index.

Log Context

Log “timed out waiting for relocation hand-off to complete” class name is IndexShard.java. We extracted the following from Elasticsearch source code for those seeking an in-depth context :

 // This is really bad as ongoing replication operations are preventing this shard from completing relocation
 // hand-off.
 // Fail primary relocation source and target shards.
 failShard("timed out waiting for relocation hand-off to complete"; null);
 listener.onFailure(
 new IndexShardClosedException(shardId(); "timed out waiting for relocation hand-off to complete")
 );
 } else {
 listener.onFailure(e);
 }
 }

 

How helpful was this guide?

We are sorry that this post was not useful for you!

Let us improve this post!

Tell us how we can improve this post?

Get expert answers on Elasticsearch/OpenSearch