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The bundled Docker Compose runs one Rootprint container, one Quickwit container, local-disk Quickwit storage, and Quickwit’s file-backed metastore. Scaling Rootprint means keeping Rootprint single-node and moving scale-sensitive work into Quickwit, its search engine. See Architecture for the full responsibility split and what’s stored where.

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What you can run in parallel

If you need a bigger deployment, keep one Rootprint instance and point QUICKWIT_URL at a Quickwit REST endpoint, load balancer, or Kubernetes service. Quickwit nodes serve the REST API and can redirect requests to the right service in the cluster.

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The metastore

Quickwit uses the metastore to track index configuration, split metadata, source checkpoints, and index creation state. Indexers write split data to index storage and publish metadata to the metastore. Searchers read the metastore before planning a query. The default file-backed metastore used by the bundled Compose file is not a distributed metastore.

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Switch to the PostgreSQL metastore

Provision a Postgres instance and point Quickwit at it with metastore_uri or the QW_METASTORE_URI environment variable:
The Quickwit database must already exist. Quickwit creates and migrates its own tables on startup. Use a managed Postgres service unless you already operate Postgres yourself. See Quickwit metastore configuration for connection-string options and metastore behavior.

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Move index storage to object storage

Quickwit indexers and searchers are stateless: they share state through object storage and the metastore, not a local disk. Every node must be able to reach the index data. The bundled Compose keeps index data in a local Docker volume, which is single-node only. For any multi-node cluster, move it to shared object storage:
  • Set QW_DEFAULT_INDEX_ROOT_URI to an object storage URI such as s3://my-bucket/indexes.
  • Keep QW_METASTORE_URI on PostgreSQL, and configure the same storage credentials and flavor on every node.
Quickwit supports S3 and S3-compatible storage (MinIO, Garage, DigitalOcean Spaces), Azure Blob Storage, and Google Cloud Storage. The Docker Compose install page shows the S3 setup; the storage reference covers the other backends.

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Scale the Quickwit cluster to your load

Quickwit ships as a single binary that runs any combination of services (indexers, searchers, a control plane, a metastore service, and a janitor), selected per node with quickwit run --service ... or QW_ENABLED_SERVICES. Because nodes coordinate through PostgreSQL and object storage, you grow the cluster by adding nodes, not by resizing one machine. Your workload drives how far you scale: add indexers when ingest throughput is the bottleneck, and add searchers (stateless, sized by query concurrency) when search or aggregations are. The control plane, metastore service, and janitor are lightweight. One of each is usually enough. For Kubernetes, start from the official Quickwit Helm chart.

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Sizing rough numbers

Use these as starting points and measure.