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Elastic Docs ›Elasticsearch Guide [6.3] ›Search APIs ›Profile API

Profiling Aggregations

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Profiling Aggregations

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aggregations Section

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The aggregations section contains detailed timing of the aggregation tree executed by a particular shard. The overall structure of this aggregation tree will resemble your original Elasticsearch request. Let’s execute the previous query again and look at the aggregation profile this time:

GET /twitter/_search
{
  "profile": true,
  "query": {
    "term": {
      "user": {
        "value": "test"
      }
    }
  },
  "aggs": {
    "my_scoped_agg": {
      "terms": {
        "field": "likes"
      }
    },
    "my_global_agg": {
      "global": {},
      "aggs": {
        "my_level_agg": {
          "terms": {
            "field": "likes"
          }
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "post_filter": {
    "match": {
      "message": "some"
    }
  }
}

Which yields the following aggregation profile output

{
  "profile" : {
    "shards" : [
      {
        "aggregations" : [
          {
            "type" : "LongTermsAggregator",
            "description" : "my_scoped_agg",
            "time_in_nanos" : 195386,
            "breakdown" : {
              "reduce" : 0,
              "build_aggregation" : 81171,
              "build_aggregation_count" : 1,
              "initialize" : 22753,
              "initialize_count" : 1,
              "reduce_count" : 0,
              "collect" : 91456,
              "collect_count" : 4
            }
          },
          {
            "type" : "GlobalAggregator",
            "description" : "my_global_agg",
            "time_in_nanos" : 190430,
            "breakdown" : {
              "reduce" : 0,
              "build_aggregation" : 59990,
              "build_aggregation_count" : 1,
              "initialize" : 29619,
              "initialize_count" : 1,
              "reduce_count" : 0,
              "collect" : 100815,
              "collect_count" : 4
            },
            "children" : [
              {
                "type" : "LongTermsAggregator",
                "description" : "my_level_agg",
                "time_in_nanos" : 160329,
                "breakdown" : {
                  "reduce" : 0,
                  "build_aggregation" : 55712,
                  "build_aggregation_count" : 1,
                  "initialize" : 10559,
                  "initialize_count" : 1,
                  "reduce_count" : 0,
                  "collect" : 94052,
                  "collect_count" : 4
                }
              }
            ]
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

From the profile structure we can see that the my_scoped_agg is internally being run as a LongTermsAggregator (because the field it is aggregating, likes, is a numeric field). At the same level, we see a GlobalAggregator which comes from my_global_agg. That aggregation then has a child LongTermsAggregator which from the second terms aggregation on likes.

The time_in_nanos field shows the time executed by each aggregation, and is inclusive of all children. While the overall time is useful, the breakdown field will give detailed stats about how the time was spent.

Timing Breakdown

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The breakdown component lists detailed timing statistics about low-level Lucene execution:

"breakdown": {
  "reduce": 0,
  "reduce_count": 0,
  "build_aggregation": 49765,
  "build_aggregation_count": 300,
  "initialize": 52785,
  "initialize_count": 300,
  "reduce_count": 0,
  "collect": 3155490036,
  "collect_count": 1800
}

Timings are listed in wall-clock nanoseconds and are not normalized at all. All caveats about the overall time apply here. The intention of the breakdown is to give you a feel for A) what machinery in Elasticsearch is actually eating time, and B) the magnitude of differences in times between the various components. Like the overall time, the breakdown is inclusive of all children times.

The meaning of the stats are as follows:

All parameters:

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initialise

This times how long it takes to create and initialise the aggregation before starting to collect documents.

collect

This represents the cumulative time spent in the collect phase of the aggregation. This is where matching documents are passed to the aggregation and the state of the aggregator is updated based on the information contained in the documents.

build_aggregation

This represents the time spent creating the shard level results of the aggregation ready to pass back to the reducing node after the collection of documents is finished.

reduce

This is not currently used and will always report 0. Currently aggregation profiling only times the shard level parts of the aggregation execution. Timing of the reduce phase will be added later.

*_count

Records the number of invocations of the particular method. For example, "collect_count": 2, means the collect() method was called on two different documents.

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