Index recovery prioritization

Unallocated shards are recovered in order of priority, whenever possible. Indices are sorted into priority order as follows:

This means that, by default, newer indices will be recovered before older indices.

Use the per-index dynamically updatable index.priority setting to customise the index prioritization order. For instance:

PUT index_1

PUT index_2

PUT index_3
{
  "settings": {
    "index.priority": 10
  }
}

PUT index_4
{
  "settings": {
    "index.priority": 5
  }
}

In the above example:

This setting accepts an integer, and can be updated on a live index with the update index settings API:

PUT index_4/_settings
{
  "index.priority": 1
}