I'm building a project that indexes celebrity-related content across sites (tmz, people, etc) because I always thought that it would be funny to "bet" on people (and maybe shows, directors, etc) like horse racing or the stock market -- only, you know, not with real money -- where the value of the person changes day to day and hour to hour and even minute to minute if we can figure this out together, stack overflow denizens.
I assign traffic values to users based on mentions in social media. I have some scrapers (probably violating some TOSes) and access to Twitter's API to get relative counts for search results for a time, so I have known "numbers" to associate w/ users outside of elasticsearch for periods of time to build the trends. Now to be clear, I am not looking to implement trending based on the number of documents in the system, that actually stays pretty consistent, but I need to rank documents that already exist based on trends.
So that's what I've got: a few hundred thousand articles with pre-determined associations to individual celebrities. Data for on-the-minute associations of a score to those celebrities which are then merged and applied to each article so that each article has a few scores associated (there's some complexity here that does not matter, but the bottom line is that I have 10 or so values that I want to assign to content to sort it when you're on the market page and I want to sort those w/ a function or script score).
So the question: How the heck do I assign these values without making elasticsearch go crazy with re-indexing? I need to use these values to sort dozens of requests per second coming from feeds on the site, but I am running this on a raspberry pi... literally, I've maxed the poor thing out for memory.
We're real write heavy, but if for some reason celebrity stock markets takes off, we're also real read heavy at the same time. I swear I remember a plugin that had metadata associated with content, but I cannot find it.
I've tried enable=false and index=false, but they seem to still thrash the read times while writing the updates. The best I've gotten to is slowing down the refresh_interval, but that's still pretty expensive and starts to affect the "real-time" nature of the app.
I believe that this is impossible as you've laid it out. Any updates to a field will update _source and fire the full update process.
There are some alternatives that you might consider: