Translog

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Changes to Lucene are only persisted to disk during a Lucene commit, which is a relatively expensive operation and so cannot be performed after every index or delete operation. Changes that happen after one commit and before another will be removed from the index by Lucene in the event of process exit or hardware failure.

Because Lucene commits are too expensive to perform on every individual change, each shard copy also has a transaction log known as its translog associated with it. All index and delete operations are written to the translog after being processed by the internal Lucene index but before they are acknowledged. In the event of a crash, recent transactions that have been acknowledged but not yet included in the last Lucene commit can instead be recovered from the translog when the shard recovers.

An Elasticsearch flush is the process of performing a Lucene commit and starting a new translog. Flushes are performed automatically in the background in order to make sure the translog doesn’t grow too large, which would make replaying its operations take a considerable amount of time during recovery. The ability to perform a flush manually is also exposed through an API, although this is rarely needed.

Translog settings

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The data in the translog is only persisted to disk when the translog is fsynced and committed. In the event of hardware failure, any data written since the previous translog commit will be lost.

By default, Elasticsearch fsyncs and commits the translog every 5 seconds if index.translog.durability is set to async or if set to request (default) at the end of every index, delete, update, or bulk request. More precisely, if set to request, Elasticsearch will only report success of an index, delete, update, or bulk request to the client after the translog has been successfully fsynced and committed on the primary and on every allocated replica.

The following dynamically updatable per-index settings control the behaviour of the translog:

index.translog.sync_interval
How often the translog is fsynced to disk and committed, regardless of write operations. Defaults to 5s. Values less than 100ms are not allowed.
index.translog.durability

Whether or not to fsync and commit the translog after every index, delete, update, or bulk request. This setting accepts the following parameters:

request
(default) fsync and commit after every request. In the event of hardware failure, all acknowledged writes will already have been committed to disk.
async
fsync and commit in the background every sync_interval. In the event of hardware failure, all acknowledged writes since the last automatic commit will be discarded.
index.translog.flush_threshold_size
The translog stores all operations that are not yet safely persisted in Lucene (i.e., are not part of a Lucene commit point). Although these operations are available for reads, they will need to be reindexed if the shard was to shutdown and has to be recovered. This settings controls the maximum total size of these operations, to prevent recoveries from taking too long. Once the maximum size has been reached a flush will happen, generating a new Lucene commit point. Defaults to 512mb.
index.translog.retention.size
The total size of translog files to keep. Keeping more translog files increases the chance of performing an operation based sync when recovering replicas. If the translog files are not sufficient, replica recovery will fall back to a file based sync. Defaults to 512mb
index.translog.retention.age
The maximum duration for which translog files will be kept. Defaults to 12h.

What to do if the translog becomes corrupted?

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In some cases (a bad drive, user error) the translog on a shard copy can become corrupted. When this corruption is detected by Elasticsearch due to mismatching checksums, Elasticsearch will fail that shard copy and refuse to use that copy of the data. If there are other copies of the shard available then Elasticsearch will automatically recover from one of them using the normal shard allocation and recovery mechanism. In particular, if the corrupt shard copy was the primary when the corruption was detected then one of its replicas will be promoted in its place.

If there is no copy of the data from which Elasticsearch can recover successfully, a user may want to recover the data that is part of the shard at the cost of losing the data that is currently contained in the translog. We provide a command-line tool for this, elasticsearch-translog.

The elasticsearch-translog tool should not be run while Elasticsearch is running. If you attempt to run this tool while Elasticsearch is running, you will permanently lose the documents that were contained only in the translog!

In order to run the elasticsearch-translog tool, specify the truncate subcommand as well as the directory for the corrupted translog with the -d option:

$ bin/elasticsearch-translog truncate -d /var/lib/elasticsearchdata/nodes/0/indices/P45vf_YQRhqjfwLMUvSqDw/0/translog/
Checking existing translog files
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!   WARNING: Elasticsearch MUST be stopped before running this tool   !
!                                                                     !
!   WARNING:    Documents inside of translog files will be lost       !
!                                                                     !
!   WARNING:          The following files will be DELETED!            !
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
--> data/nodes/0/indices/P45vf_YQRhqjfwLMUvSqDw/0/translog/translog-41.ckp
--> data/nodes/0/indices/P45vf_YQRhqjfwLMUvSqDw/0/translog/translog-6.ckp
--> data/nodes/0/indices/P45vf_YQRhqjfwLMUvSqDw/0/translog/translog-37.ckp
--> data/nodes/0/indices/P45vf_YQRhqjfwLMUvSqDw/0/translog/translog-24.ckp
--> data/nodes/0/indices/P45vf_YQRhqjfwLMUvSqDw/0/translog/translog-11.ckp

Continue and DELETE files? [y/N] y
Reading translog UUID information from Lucene commit from shard at [data/nodes/0/indices/P45vf_YQRhqjfwLMUvSqDw/0/index]
Translog Generation: 3
Translog UUID      : AxqC4rocTC6e0fwsljAh-Q
Removing existing translog files
Creating new empty checkpoint at [data/nodes/0/indices/P45vf_YQRhqjfwLMUvSqDw/0/translog/translog.ckp]
Creating new empty translog at [data/nodes/0/indices/P45vf_YQRhqjfwLMUvSqDw/0/translog/translog-3.tlog]
Done.

You can also use the -h option to get a list of all options and parameters that the elasticsearch-translog tool supports.