Segments and merging policies

A Lucene index is composed of smaller chunks that are called segments. In other words, a segment is a section of an index. Each segment is a fully independent index. A new segment can be created when a new document is added or, in the automatic refresh process, it occurs every second by default in Elasticsearch. Each segment consumes system resources (that is, memory, CPU cycles, and so on) and, besides, every segment is checked at search time. This means that if there are more segments, they will be searched and there will be more memory usage. For these reasons, increasing the number of segments is a problem. Small segments are copied to the bigger segment to solve this problem, and the copied segments are deleted from the disk. This operation is called segment merging. It is executed as asynchronous and automatically processes in the background while you are indexing and searching. Segment merging operation saves system resources as well as disk space because...