Elasticsearch 2.1: Result window is too large (index.max_result_window)

If you need deep pagination, one possible solution is to increase the value max_result_window. You can use curl to do this from your shell command line:

curl -XPUT "http://localhost:9200/my_index/_settings" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{ "index" : { "max_result_window" : 500000 } }'

I did not notice increased memory usage, for values of ~ 100k.

The right solution would be to use scrolling.
However, if you want to extend the results search returns beyond 10,000 results, you can do it easily with Kibana:

Go to Dev Tools and just post the following to your index (your_index_name), specifing what would be the new max result window

PUT your_index_name/_settings
{ 
  "max_result_window" : 500000 
}

If all goes well, you should see the following success response:

{
  "acknowledged": true
}