Specifying the refresh parameter refreshes all shards involved in the delete by query once the request completes. This is different than the delete API’s refresh parameter, which causes just the shard that received the delete request to be refreshed. Unlike the delete API, it does not support wait_for.

If the request contains wait_for_completion=false, Elasticsearch performs some preflight checks, launches the request, and returns a task you can use to cancel or get the status of the task. Elasticsearch creates a record of this task as a document at .tasks/task/${taskId}. When you are done with a task, you should delete the task document so Elasticsearch can reclaim the space.

wait_for_active_shards controls how many copies of a shard must be active before proceeding with the request. See Active shards for details. timeout controls how long each write request waits for unavailable shards to become available. Both work exactly the way they work in the Bulk API. Delete by query uses scrolled searches, so you can also specify the scroll parameter to control how long it keeps the search context alive, for example ?scroll=10m. The default is 5 minutes.

To control the rate at which delete by query issues batches of delete operations, you can set requests_per_second to any positive decimal number. This pads each batch with a wait time to throttle the rate. Set requests_per_second to -1 to disable throttling.

Throttling uses a wait time between batches so that the internal scroll requests can be given a timeout that takes the request padding into account. The padding time is the difference between the batch size divided by the requests_per_second and the time spent writing. By default the batch size is 1000, so if requests_per_second is set to 500:

target_time = 1000 / 500 per second = 2 seconds
wait_time = target_time - write_time = 2 seconds - .5 seconds = 1.5 seconds

Since the batch is issued as a single _bulk request, large batch sizes cause Elasticsearch to create many requests and wait before starting the next set. This is "bursty" instead of "smooth".

Delete by query supports sliced scroll to parallelize the delete process. This can improve efficiency and provide a convenient way to break the request down into smaller parts.

Setting slices to auto chooses a reasonable number for most indices. If you’re slicing manually or otherwise tuning automatic slicing, keep in mind that:

Whether query or delete performance dominates the runtime depends on the documents being reindexed and cluster resources.

Use the tasks API to get the status of a delete by query operation:

GET _tasks?detailed=true&actions=*/delete/byquery

The response looks like:

{
  "nodes" : {
    "r1A2WoRbTwKZ516z6NEs5A" : {
      "name" : "r1A2WoR",
      "transport_address" : "127.0.0.1:9300",
      "host" : "127.0.0.1",
      "ip" : "127.0.0.1:9300",
      "attributes" : {
        "testattr" : "test",
        "portsfile" : "true"
      },
      "tasks" : {
        "r1A2WoRbTwKZ516z6NEs5A:36619" : {
          "node" : "r1A2WoRbTwKZ516z6NEs5A",
          "id" : 36619,
          "type" : "transport",
          "action" : "indices:data/write/delete/byquery",
          "status" : {    
            "total" : 6154,
            "updated" : 0,
            "created" : 0,
            "deleted" : 3500,
            "batches" : 36,
            "version_conflicts" : 0,
            "noops" : 0,
            "retries": 0,
            "throttled_millis": 0
          },
          "description" : ""
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

With the task id you can look up the task directly:

GET /_tasks/r1A2WoRbTwKZ516z6NEs5A:36619

The advantage of this API is that it integrates with wait_for_completion=false to transparently return the status of completed tasks. If the task is completed and wait_for_completion=false was set on it then it’ll come back with results or an error field. The cost of this feature is the document that wait_for_completion=false creates at .tasks/task/${taskId}. It is up to you to delete that document.

Cancel a delete by query operationedit

Any delete by query can be canceled using the task cancel API:

POST _tasks/r1A2WoRbTwKZ516z6NEs5A:36619/_cancel

The task ID can be found using the tasks API.

Cancellation should happen quickly but might take a few seconds. The task status API above will continue to list the delete by query task until this task checks that it has been cancelled and terminates itself.