elasticsearch/elasticsearch — pull request #5447 by kimchy (2014-03-17 17:23:44+00:00)
Title: Move to use serial merge schedule by default

Today, we use ConcurrentMergeScheduler, and this can be painful since it is concurrent on a shard level, with a max of 3 threads doing concurrent merges. If there are several shards being indexed, then there will be a minor explosion of threads trying to do merges, all being throttled by our merge throttling.
Moving to serial merge scheduler will still maintain concurrency of merges across shards, as we have the merge thread pool that schedules those merges. It will just be a serial one on a specific shard.
Also, on serial merge scheduler, we now have a limit of how many merges it will do at one go, so it will let other shards get their fair chance of merging. We use the pending merges on IW to check if merges are needed or not for it.
Note, that if a merge is happening, it will not block due to a sync on the maybeMerge call at indexing (flush) time, since we wrap our merge scheduler with the EnabledMergeScheduler, where maybeMerge is not activated during indexing, only with explicit calls to IW#maybeMerge (see Merges).