Connection Pool

Connection Pool is an internal construct that maintains a list(‘pool’) of connections to nodes that may be alive or dead. The job of a Connection Pool is to handle these dead and alive connections and return back an alive connection to provide the best behavior for the client. In case no alive connection can be found, a nil is returned. There are some in-built connection pools that you can use or you can even write and use your own custom connection pool.

Note

A connection pool is called every time a request to the Elasticsearch server is to be made. It internally uses the selector to choose a connection.

In-Built Connection Pools

These connection pools are defined inside elasticsearch.connectionpool module. There are two of them:

• StaticConnectionPool (Default): The StaticConnectionPool selects a connection using a selector. It returns the connection if it is alive. If the connection is dead and a certain time interval has passed, it is tested again. If it is still dead, another connection is selected using the selector and the process is repeated. If no alive connection is found, the remaining dead connections are tested one by one.
• SniffConnectionPool: The SniffConnectionPool iterates the list of connections and returns the first alive connection found. For dead connections, it pings again to update its status. Also, after a certain time interval, it sniffs the existing connections to discover new nodes in the cluster and update its list of connections.

To use any particular connection pool you have to specify it in the parameters while creating a client. By default, the StaticConnectionPool will be used.

Custom Connection Pool

You can also implement your own custom connection pool and pass it to the client. To create a custom connection pool, extend elasticsearch.connectionpool.ConnectionPool and implement the nextConnection function.

-- Requiring the Base Class
local ConnectionPool = require "elasticsearch.connectionpool.ConnectionPool"

-- Create a custom connection pool
local CustomConnectionPool = ConnectionPool:new()

-- Implement the constructor function
function CustomConnectionPool:new(o)
  o = o or {}
  -- Custom initialization code related to your algorithm
  -- End custom code
  setmetatable(o, self)
  self.__index = self
  return o
end

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Implement the logic to return a single connection
--
-- @return  Connection    The connection selected
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
function CustomConnectionPool:nextConnection()
  local connection = -- Select a connection
  return connection
end

After creating a custom ConnectionPool, it needs to be passed as a parameter while creating a client:

local client = elasticsearch.client{
  params = {
    connectionPool = CustomConnectionPool
  }
}

Note

A string is passed in connectionPool when setting an in-built Connection Pool. Otherwise, an object is passed while setting a custom Connection Pool.