Best Elasticsearch practices in production

This section is dedicated to guide you on following the best practices and considerations to keep in mind when going into production.

Memory

• Always choose ES_HEAP_SIZE 50% of the total available memory. Sorting and aggregations both can be memory hungry, so enough heap space to accommodate these is required. This property is set inside the /etc/init.d/elasticsearch file.
• A machine with 64 GB of RAM is ideal; however, 32 GB and 16 GB machines are also common. Less than 8 GB tends to be counterproductive (you end up needing smaller machines), and greater than 64 GB has problems in pointer compression.

CPU

Choose a modern processor with multiple cores. If you need to choose between faster CPUs or more cores, choose more cores. The extra concurrency that multiple cores offer will far outweigh a slightly faster clock speed. The number of threads is dependent on the number of cores. The more cores you have, the more threads you get for indexing, searching...