Docs: More search speed advices. (#24802)

2 files changed, 40 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/docs/reference/how-to/search-speed.asciidoc b/docs/reference/how-to/search-speed.asciidoc
index 2d0525a48e..42a03dd8fd 100644
--- a/docs/reference/how-to/search-speed.asciidoc
+++ b/docs/reference/how-to/search-speed.asciidoc
@@ -310,3 +310,19 @@ setting.
 WARNING: Loading data into the filesystem cache eagerly on too many indices or
 too many files will make search _slower_ if the filesystem cache is not large
 enough to hold all the data. Use with caution.
+
+[float]
+=== Map identifiers as `keyword`
+
+When you have numeric identifiers in your documents, it is tempting to map them
+as numbers, which is consistent with their json type. However, the way that
+Elasticsearch indexes numbers optimizes for `range` queries while `keyword`
+fields are better at `term` queries. Since identifiers are never used in `range`
+queries, they should be mapped as a `keyword`.
+
+[float]
+=== Use index sorting to speed up conjunctions
+
+<<index-modules-index-sorting,Index sorting>> can be useful in order to make
+conjunctions faster at the cost of slightly slower indexing. Read more about it
+in the <<index-modules-index-sorting-conjunctions,index sorting documentation>>.
diff --git a/docs/reference/index-modules/index-sorting.asciidoc b/docs/reference/index-modules/index-sorting.asciidoc
index 0c2b5c9abe..38b734546b 100644
--- a/docs/reference/index-modules/index-sorting.asciidoc
+++ b/docs/reference/index-modules/index-sorting.asciidoc
@@ -105,3 +105,27 @@ Index sorting supports the following settings:
 [WARNING]
 Index sorting can be defined only once at index creation. It is not allowed to add or update
 a sort on an existing index.
+
+// TODO: Also document how index sorting can be used to early-terminate
+// sorted search requests when the total number of matches is not needed
+
+[[index-modules-index-sorting-conjunctions]]
+=== Use index sorting to speed up conjunctions
+
+Index sorting can be useful in order to organize Lucene doc ids (not to be
+conflated with `_id`) in a way that makes conjunctions (a AND b AND ...) more
+efficient. In order to be efficient, conjunctions rely on the fact that if any
+clause does not match, then the entire conjunction does not match. By using
+index sorting, we can put documents that do not match together, which will
+help skip efficiently over large ranges of doc IDs that do not match the
+conjunction.
+
+This trick only works with low-cardinality fields. A rule of thumb is that
+you should sort first on fields that both have a low cardinality and are
+frequently used for filtering. The sort order (`asc` or `desc`) does not
+matter as we only care about putting values that would match the same clauses
+close to each other.
+
+For instance if you were indexing cars for sale, it might be interesting to
+sort by fuel type, body type, make, year of registration and finally mileage.
+