Setting up for Linux systems

If you are using a Linux system, you need to manage extra setup steps to improve performance or to resolve production problems with many indices.

This recipe covers two common errors that occur in production:

• Too many open files, which can corrupt your indices and data
• Slow performance when searching and indexing due to the garbage collector

  Note

  Other possible troubles arise when you run out of disk space. In this scenario, some files can get corrupted. To prevent your indices from corruption and possible data loss, a best practice is to monitor the storage space available.

Getting ready

You need a working ElasticSearch installation.

How to do it...

In order to improve performance on Linux systems, perform the following steps:

1. First, you need to change the current limit of the users that runs the ElasticSearch server. In our examples, we will call it elasticsearch.
2. To allow ElasticSearch to manage a large number of files, you need to increment the number of file descriptors...