Case Study: Lexer achieves 30–40% faster search performance with Elastic (Elasticsearch 5.4.1)

Lexer's upgrade to Elasticsearch 5.4.1 improved search speeds by 30-40%

Lexer, a customer-data and social-analytics platform, migrated its entire 2.8 billion–document, 14 TB dataset to Elasticsearch 5.4.1 to support fast growth (from ~1M to ~30M social items per day) and to ensure resilience and compatibility for complex queries such as geo filters and boolean logic.

The team split the corpus into 90 smaller indexes, updated their domain-specific query translation library, rigorously tested query behavior, and used Elasticsearch snapshot/restore to move data via S3 (rebuilding the full cluster in ~40 minutes). The upgrade yielded immediate benefits: overall query speed improved ~13% and key features saw 30–40% faster performance, saving clients about six hours a day collectively, plus a robust 15‑minute backup cadence and tested disaster-recovery process.

Lexer

Chris Scobell

VP of Human Interface