Query Phase

During the initial query phase, the query is broadcast to a shard copy (a primary or replica shard) of every shard in the index. Each shard executes the search locally and builds a priority queue of matching documents.

Priority Queue

A priority queue is just a sorted list that holds the top-n matching documents. The size of the priority queue depends on the pagination parameters from and size. For example, the following search request would require a priority queue big enough to hold 100 documents:

GET /_search
{
    "from": 90,
    "size": 10
}

The query phase process is depicted in Query phase of distributed search.

The query phase consists of the following three steps:

  1. The client sends a search request to Node 3, which creates an empty priority queue of size from + size.

  2. Node 3 forwards the search request to a primary or replica copy of every shard in the index. Each shard executes the query locally and adds the results into a local sorted priority queue of size from + size.

  3. Each shard returns the doc IDs and sort values of all the docs in its priority queue to the coordinating node, Node 3, which merges these values into its own priority queue to produce a globally sorted list of results.

When a search request is sent to a node, that node becomes the coordinating node. It is the job of this node to broadcast the search request to all involved shards, and to gather their responses into a globally sorted result set that it can return to the client.

The first step is to broadcast the request to a shard copy of every node in the index. Just like document GET requests, search requests can be handled by a primary shard or by any of its replicas. This is how more replicas (when combined with more hardware) can increase search throughput. A coordinating node will round-robin through all shard copies on subsequent requests in order to spread the load.

Each shard executes the query locally and builds a sorted priority queue of length from + size—in other words, enough results to satisfy the global search request all by itself. It returns a lightweight list of results to the coordinating node, which contains just the doc IDs and any values required for sorting, such as the _score.

The coordinating node merges these shard-level results into its own sorted priority queue, which represents the globally sorted result set. Here the query phase ends.

Note

An index can consist of one or more primary shards, so a search request against a single index needs to be able to combine the results from multiple shards. A search against multiple or all indices works in exactly the same way—​there are just more shards involved.

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