How to Fix Read timed out in Elasticsearch

Question

I used Elasticsearch-1.1.0 to index tweets. The indexing process is okay. Then I upgraded the version. Now I use Elasticsearch-1.3.2, and I get this message randomly:

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Answer 1

Read timeouts can also happen when query size is large. For example, in my case of a pretty large ES index size (> 3M documents), doing a search for a query with 30 words took around 2 seconds, while doing a search for a query with 400 words took over 18 seconds. So for a sufficiently large query even timeout=30 won't save you. An easy solution is to crop the query to the size that can be answered below the timeout.