Elasticsearch 2.1: Result window is too large (index.max_result_window)

Question

We retrieve information from Elasticsearch 2.1 and allow the user to page thru the results. When the user requests a high page number we get the following error message:

Answer 1

If you need deep pagination, one possible solution is to increase the value max_result_window. You can use curl to do this from your shell command line:

curl -XPUT "http://localhost:9200/my_index/_settings" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{ "index" : { "max_result_window" : 500000 } }'

I did not notice increased memory usage, for values of ~ 100k.