Mastering Elasticsearch - Second Edition

Scaling Elasticsearch

As we already said multiple times both in this book and in Elasticsearch Server Second Edition, Elasticsearch is a highly scalable search and analytics platform. We can scale it both horizontally and vertically.

Vertical scaling

When we talk about vertical scaling, we often mean adding more resources to the server Elasticsearch is running on: we can add memory and we can switch to a machine with better CPU or faster disk storage. Of course, with better machines, we can expect increase in performance; depending on our deployment and its bottleneck, there can be smaller or higher improvement. However, there are limitations when it comes to vertical scaling. For example, one of such is the maximum amount of physical memory available ...