Connection poolsedit

Connection pooling is the internal mechanism that takes care of registering what nodes there are in the cluster and which NEST can use to issue client calls on.

Despite the name, a connection pool in NEST is not like connection pooling that you may be familiar with from interacting with a database using ADO.Net; for example, a connection pool in NEST is not responsible for managing an underlying pool of TCP connections to Elasticsearch, this is handled by the ServicePointManager in Desktop CLR and can be controlled by changing the ServicePoint behaviour on HttpConnection.

So, what is a connection pool in NEST responsible for? It is responsible for managing the nodes in an Elasticsearch cluster to which a connection can be made and there is one instance of an IConnectionPool associated with an instance of ConnectionSettings. Since a single client and connection settings instance is recommended for the life of the application, the lifetime of a single connection pool instance will also be bound to the lifetime of the application.

There are four types of connection pool

SingleNodeConnectionPooledit

The simplest of all connection pools and the default if no connection pool is explicitly passed to the ConnectionSettings constructor. It takes a single Uri and uses that to connect to Elasticsearch for all the calls. Single node connection pool doesn’t opt in to sniffing or pinging behavior and will never mark nodes dead or alive. The one Uri it holds is always ready to go.

Single node connection pool is the pool to use if your cluster contains only a single node or you are interacting with your cluster through a single load balancer instance.

var uri = new Uri("http://localhost:9201");
var pool = new SingleNodeConnectionPool(uri);
pool.Nodes.Should().HaveCount(1);
var node = pool.Nodes.First();
node.Uri.Port.Should().Be(9201);

This type of pool is hardwired to opt out of reseeding (thus, sniffing) as well as pinging

pool.SupportsReseeding.Should().BeFalse();
pool.SupportsPinging.Should().BeFalse();

When you use the low ceremony ElasticClient constructor that takes a single Uri, internally a SingleNodeConnectionPool is used

var client = new ElasticClient(uri);
client.ConnectionSettings.ConnectionPool
    .Should().BeOfType<SingleNodeConnectionPool>();

However we urge that you always pass your connection settings explicitly

client = new ElasticClient(new ConnectionSettings(uri));
client.ConnectionSettings.ConnectionPool
    .Should().BeOfType<SingleNodeConnectionPool>();

or even better pass the connection pool explicitly

client = new ElasticClient(new ConnectionSettings(pool));
client.ConnectionSettings.ConnectionPool
    .Should().BeOfType<SingleNodeConnectionPool>();

StaticConnectionPooledit

The static connection pool is great if you have a known small sized cluster and do no want to enable sniffing to find out the cluster topology.

var uris = Enumerable.Range(9200, 5)
    .Select(port => new Uri($"http://localhost:{port}"));

a connection pool can be seeded using an enumerable of Uri

var pool = new StaticConnectionPool(uris);

Or using an enumerable of Node

var nodes = uris.Select(u => new Node(u));
pool = new StaticConnectionPool(nodes);

This type of pool is hardwired to opt out of reseeding (and hence sniffing) but supports pinging when enabled

pool.SupportsReseeding.Should().BeFalse();
pool.SupportsPinging.Should().BeTrue();

To create a client using the static connection pool, pass the connection pool to the ConnectionSettings you pass to ElasticClient

var client = new ElasticClient(new ConnectionSettings(pool));
client.ConnectionSettings.ConnectionPool
    .Should().BeOfType<StaticConnectionPool>();

SniffingConnectionPooledit

A pool derived from StaticConnectionPool, a sniffing connection pool allows itself to be reseeded at run time. It comes with the very minor overhead of a ReaderWriterLockSlim to ensure thread safety.

var uris = Enumerable.Range(9200, 5)
    .Select(port => new Uri($"http://localhost:{port}"));

a connection pool can be seeded using an enumerable of Uri

var pool = new SniffingConnectionPool(uris);

Or using an enumerable of Node. A major benefit in using nodes is that you can include known node roles when seeding which NEST can use to favour sniffing on master eligible nodes first, and take master only nodes out of rotation for issuing client calls on.

var nodes = uris.Select(u=>new Node(u));
pool = new SniffingConnectionPool(nodes);

This type of pool is hardwired to opt in to reseeding (and hence sniffing), and pinging

pool.SupportsReseeding.Should().BeTrue();
pool.SupportsPinging.Should().BeTrue();

To create a client using the sniffing connection pool pass the connection pool to the ConnectionSettings you pass to ElasticClient

var client = new ElasticClient(new ConnectionSettings(pool));
client.ConnectionSettings.ConnectionPool
    .Should().BeOfType<SniffingConnectionPool>();

StickyConnectionPooledit

A type of connection pool that returns the first live node to issue a request against, such that the node is sticky between requests. It uses System.Threading.Interlocked to keep an indexer to the last live node in a thread safe manner.

var uris = Enumerable.Range(9200, 5)
    .Select(port => new Uri($"http://localhost:{port}"));

a connection pool can be seeded using an enumerable of Uri

var pool = new StickyConnectionPool(uris);

Or using an enumerable of Node. A major benefit here is you can include known node roles when seeding and NEST can use this information to favour sniffing on master eligible nodes first and take master only nodes out of rotation for issuing client calls on.

var nodes = uris.Select(u=>new Node(u));
pool = new StickyConnectionPool(nodes);

This type of pool is hardwired to opt out of reseeding (and hence sniffing), but does support sniffing

pool.SupportsReseeding.Should().BeFalse();
pool.SupportsPinging.Should().BeTrue();

To create a client using the sticky connection pool pass the connection pool to the ConnectionSettings you pass to ElasticClient

var client = new ElasticClient(new ConnectionSettings(pool));
client.ConnectionSettings.ConnectionPool
    .Should().BeOfType<StickyConnectionPool>();

Sticky Sniffing Connection Pooledit

A type of connection pool that returns the first live node to issue a request against, such that the node is sticky between requests. This implementation supports sniffing and sorting so that each instance of your application can favor a node in the same rack based on node attributes for instance.

var uris = Enumerable.Range(9200, 5)
    .Select(port => new Uri($"http://localhost:{port}"));

a sniffing sorted sticky pool takes a second parameter Func takes a Node and returns a weight. Nodes will be sorted descending by weight. In the following example we score nodes that are client nodes AND in rack_id rack_one the highest

var pool = new StickySniffingConnectionPool(uris, n =>
    (n.ClientNode ? 10 : 0)
    + (n.Settings.TryGetValue("node.attr.rack_id", out string rackId)
            && rackId == "rack_one" ? 10 : 0));

pool.SupportsReseeding.Should().BeTrue();
pool.SupportsPinging.Should().BeTrue();

To create a client using the sticky sniffing connection pool pass the connection pool to the ConnectionSettings you pass to ElasticClient

var client = new ElasticClient(new ConnectionSettings(pool));
client.ConnectionSettings.ConnectionPool
    .Should().BeOfType<StickySniffingConnectionPool>();