Elasticsearch OpenSearch Scroll

By Opster Team

Updated: Aug 29, 2023

| 1 min read

Overview

In OpenSearch, the concept of scroll comes into play when you have a large set of search results. Large search results are exhaustive for both the OpenSearch cluster and the requesting client in terms of memory and processing. The scroll API enables you to take a snapshot of a large number of results from a single search request.

Examples

To perform a scroll search, you need to add the scroll parameter to a search query and specify how long OpenSearch should keep the search context viable.

GET mydocs-2019/_search?scroll=40s
{
"size": 5000,
"query": {
"match_all": {}
},
"sort": [
 {
 "_doc": {
  "order": "asc"
   }
  }
 ]
}

This query will return a maximum of 5000 hits. If the scroll is idle for more than 40 seconds, it will be deleted. The response will return the first page of the results and a scroll ID. You can use the scroll ID to get additional documents from the scroll. You’ll be able to keep retrieving the documents until you have all of them.

Notes

  • Changes made to documents after the scroll will not show up in your results.
  • When you are done with the scroll, you can delete it manually using the scroll ID.
DELETE _search/scroll/<scroll_id>

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