title: Elasticsearch timeout problems
body: <p>I've just started indexing pdf/word documents and some of them can get rather big. To make things worse, I'm using n-grams in my index analyzer. I have 8GB of RAM dedicated to ElasticSearch but our index is presently about 45GB big (was only about 6GB without documents) Which leads me to my problem ...</p>
  
  <p>After we added documents to our index, reindexing everything started taking much longer, which is to be expected, but it also started failing randomly with a generic timeout error. I traced the problem to our http client (HTTParty ruby gem) which had a default timeout of 10s. I increased it to 480s and the reindex gets to more documents but still times out eventually.</p>
  
  <p>My question is, </p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>should Elasticsearch take that long to respond to an index request?</li>
  <li>What can I do to fix the problem?</li>
  </ol>