Mastering Elasticsearch 5.x - Third Edition

Index versus type - a revised approach for creating indices

In the beginning of this chapter, we talked about strategies for choosing the right amount of shards and replicas for indices in Choosing the right amount of shards and replicas. Now, we will bring another factor; document types which can be taken into account while creating indices with a greater or fewer number of shards.

Creating too many indices or creating too many shards is always very resource demanding, since in the end every index or shard is internally a Lucene index, which has particular overhead of memory usage, file descriptors, and other resources needed. With a larger number of shards or indices, the other overhead comes at the time of search. More shards means search is ...