The connection pool maintains the list of connections, and decides when nodes should transition from alive to dead (and vice versa). It has no logic to choose connections, however. That job belongs to the selector class.

The job of a selector is to return a single connection from a provided array of connections. Like the connection pool, there are several implementations to choose from.

RoundRobinSelector (Default)edit

This selector returns connections in a round-robin fashion. Node #1 is selected on the first request, Node #2 on the second request, and so on. This ensures an even load of traffic across your cluster. Round-robining happens on a per-request basis (for example sequential requests go to different nodes).

The RoundRobinSelector is default but if you wish to explicitly configure it you can do:

$client = ClientBuilder::create()
            ->setSelector('\Elasticsearch\ConnectionPool\Selectors\RoundRobinSelector')
            ->build();

Note that the implementation is specified via a namespace path to the class.

StickyRoundRobinSelectoredit

This selector is "sticky", so that it prefers to reuse the same connection repeatedly. For example, Node #1 is chosen on the first request. Node #1 will continue to be re-used for each subsequent request until that node fails. Upon failure, the selector will round-robin to the next available node, then "stick" to that node.

This is an ideal strategy for many PHP scripts. Since PHP scripts are shared-nothing and tend to exit quickly, creating new connections for each request is often a sub-optimal strategy and introduces a lot of overhead. Instead, it is better to "stick" to a single connection for the duration of the script.

By default, this selector randomizes the hosts upon initialization which still guarantees an even load distribution across the cluster. It changes the round-robin dynamics from per-request to per-script.

If you are using Future Mode, the "sticky" behavior of this selector is non-ideal, since all parallel requests go to the same node instead of multiple nodes in your cluster. When using future mode, the default RoundRobinSelector should be preferred.

If you wish to use this selector, you may do so with:

$client = ClientBuilder::create()
            ->setSelector('\Elasticsearch\ConnectionPool\Selectors\StickyRoundRobinSelector')
            ->build();

Note that the implementation is specified via a namespace path to the class.

RandomSelectoredit

This selector returns a random node, regardless of state. It is generally just for testing.

If you wish to use this selector, you may do so with:

$client = ClientBuilder::create()
            ->setSelector('\Elasticsearch\ConnectionPool\Selectors\RandomSelector')
            ->build();

Note that the implementation is specified via a namespace path to the class.

Custom Selectoredit

You can implement your own custom selector. Custom selectors must implement SelectorInterface:

namespace MyProject\Selectors;

use Elasticsearch\Connections\ConnectionInterface;
use Elasticsearch\ConnectionPool\Selectors\SelectorInterface

class MyCustomSelector implements SelectorInterface
{

    /**
     * Selects the first connection
     *
     * @param array $connections Array of Connection objects
     *
     * @return ConnectionInterface
     */
    public function select($connections)
    {
        // code here
    }

}

​

You can then use your custom selector either via object injection or namespace instantiation:

$mySelector = new MyCustomSelector();

$client = ClientBuilder::create()
            ->setSelector($mySelector)                             // object injection
            ->setSelector('\MyProject\Selectors\FirstSelector')    // or namespace
            ->build();

Quick setupedit

Selectors can be changed via the setSelector() method:

$selector = '\Elasticsearch\ConnectionPool\Selectors\StickyRoundRobinSelector';
$client = ClientBuilder::create()
            ->setSelector($selector)
            ->build();