Is there a performance difference between running elasticsearch on Linux or Windows? [closed]

The advantage of using linux for running elasticsearch is that the vast majority of elasticsearch users use this and most of the optimization efforts are linux focused. There's a lot of knowledge out there on how to tune and optimize elasticsearch on linux.

A lot of that probably ports over to windows but it is fundamentally very different in how it behaves with a different kernel, filesystem, networking, etc. I expect things probably work fine in windows but fundamentally you are pretty much on your own tuning it and diagnosing any issues you encounter.

The only reason I could see for attempting to run Elasticsearch in windows at all are 1) you have windows servers available and want to utilize them and it is not negotiable to format their drives with something more sane like Ubuntu or centos 2) it's a small non, mission critical setup where you don't actually care about tuning things or getting meaningful support for any issues you encounter and you happen to have some windows machines available for running elasticsearch.

So, unless you really want to use windows, you probably shouldn't.

The answer to this question is going to be a big fat "it depends." I have to respond to whole-heartedly disagree with the other answer. I have Elasticsearch deployed to production on Amazon Web Services as a Windows service for an enterprise-level application and have never had any problem tuning it or finding help in that regard. The other answer has a point to the extent that the official Elasticsearch documentation apparently assumes you're going to be using Linux, but that's their problem. It does not mean you're going to be on your own.

I suppose that it would be possible to get some comparable hardware and run benchmarks if you really want to find out which one you can make faster, but who has time for that? I doubt that such an experiment would make a difference to anyone but the largest websites on the Internet anyway.

That said, Elasticsearch is built for clustering. You scale by throwing more hardware at it. Linux is necessarily going to be cheaper if for no other reason than that you won't have to pay licensing costs. Unless you already have the hardware or virtual machines, you are most likely going to get more bang for your buck with Linux.