CODEWITHSUNDEEP
performanceelasticsearch
Ramin Arabbagheri
Ramin Arabbagheri

Reputation: 820

Is there a way to turn off scoring when searching in Elasticsearch, to gain performance?

I have over 33 million records in my Elasticsearch 7.1 index and when I query it, I limit the result size to 20. However, ES still scores the records internally. But this isn't important for me and in fact, I want any 20 results. So, for example I don't care if some of the results are more relevant.

My question is, is there a way to turn this behaviour off, and if so, will it improve the performance?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1951

Answers (2)

Gino Mempin
Gino Mempin

Reputation: 29600

From the Sort search results section of the Elasticsearch docs (as of 8.8):

_doc has no real use-case besides being the most efficient sort order. So if you don’t care about the order in which documents are returned, then you should sort by _doc. This especially helps when scrolling.

GET /myindex/_search
{
  "size": 1000,
  "track_total_hits": false,
  "query": {...},
  "sort": ["_doc"]   # <------- THIS.
}

You should see the max_score and _score fields in the results as null.

Upvotes: 0

Yuvraj Jaiswal
Yuvraj Jaiswal

Reputation: 1723

You can use _doc as a sort field. This will make ES return the fields sorted in the order of insertion, and hence it will not do scoring.

Here is a thread from the forums that explains more: https://discuss.elastic.co/t/most-efficient-way-to-query-without-a-score/57457/4

Upvotes: 4

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