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

Opster Team

August-23, Version: 6.8-8.9

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.

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);
 }
 }

 

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