Case Study: GitHub achieves scalable, real-time search and analytics for 4 million users with Elastic (Elasticsearch)

GitHub - Customer Case Study

GitHub, the world’s largest hosted revision control service with over 4 million users and more than 8 million repositories (about 2 billion documents), needed a search solution that satisfied both end users and developer applications while also providing operational insights to detect abuse and surface platform bugs. Their existing Solr-based approach could not scale or handle sharding and real-time indexing needs as usage grew.

GitHub migrated to Elasticsearch to index code, events and logs in near real time, enable deep programmatic search, and run analytic queries (like histogram facets) to track exceptions and reveal rogue accounts. Using elastic sharding and routing (about 128 shards, ~120 GB each), they serve ~300 searches per minute, and repository-scoped queries that hit a single shard return results roughly twice as fast—delivering scalable, high-performance search plus actionable operational insights.

GitHub

Tim Pease

Operations Engineer