Taming Elasticsearch Reindex Storms in Django

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0530

The first time I saw it, a founder saved their startup profile and Elasticsearch fell over.

Not literally — but close enough that the web request timed out and the search index spent the next several minutes catching up. One save() in Django had quietly fanned out into thousands of individual index operations. I’d wired the search layer up the textbook way, the way every django-elasticsearch-dsl tutorial shows you, and it worked beautifully right up until the data model got interesting. This is the story of how I stopped reindexing per record and started reindexing in batches — and the pitfalls that pattern hides.

From 30 Seconds to 200ms: The Django Queries Nobody Asked For

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0530

With the ERP’s permissions now defined from a screen instead of a deploy (chapter 9), the platform had crossed a line I could feel: the content team, the department heads, and the booking staff were all self-serving from the same Django backend without filing a ticket. It was doing real work for real people. And then, quietly, it started doing that work slowly.

The complaints didn’t arrive as a crash. They arrived as a shrug. “The courses page takes a while to load.” “The admin list just spins.” On a good connection the course listing came back in three or four seconds — annoying but survivable. On a mid-range Android phone on 4G in a small town, which is most of our users, the same endpoint could take twenty to thirty seconds before the first byte. That is well past the point where a user assumes the app is broken and closes it. We were losing people not to a bug, but to a spinner.

Performance on Kuldeep Pisda

Taming Elasticsearch Reindex Storms in Django

From 30 Seconds to 200ms: The Django Queries Nobody Asked For