FWIW, this is a place ES devs are spending a lot of time thinking about. For example, 1.0 introduces a new "Circuit Breaker" [1] feature which will help preven

FWIW, this is a place ES devs are spending a lot of time thinking about. For example, 1.0 introduces a new "Circuit Breaker" [1] feature which will help prevent over-eager facets from blowing out the heap. It's just one part of a very large effort to make ES handle exceptional events more gracefully (in particular, memory related). Another example are disk-based doc values [2], which are essentially pre-computed field data structures that are stored on disk. This moves Field Data off heap and allows the OS to manage memory evictions, to help minimize GCs and OOM blowouts. [1] http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index-modules-fielddata.html#fielddata-circuit-breaker http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/referenc... [2] http://www.elasticsearch.org/blog/disk-based-field-data-a-k-a-doc-values/ http://www.elasticsearch.org/blog/disk-based-field-data-a-k-...