If your development machine, hangs due to CPU usage of elastic search, here are the two settings which you need to update. I tested these settings and got real perfomance gain on my Ubuntu development machine.

The settings below should be used only on development machines.

1. Set HEAP size

My default the ElasticSearch heap size is 256m minimum and 1g maximum. You need to update the maximum size to 256m. To do this open /etc/init.d/elasticsearch and uncomment the line,

ES_HEAP_SIZE=256m

2. Set number of shards & replicas

By default the number of shards is set to 5 and replicas to 1. We can update to shards as 1 and replicas as 0 in development, which will lead to real gain of perfomance.

# /etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml
index.number_of_shards: 1
index.number_of_replicas: 0

Thanks.