From e99215f08a4c20c08e2a5b5712a110eab50d38da Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Nurzhan Sarzhan
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2026 12:53:42 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] Explain minTargetHits resolution formula and grouped topology
interaction
Customers on SUPPORT-779 had to ask twice, and needed engineering to clarify,
how totalTargetHits and minTargetHits resolve to a per-node target hits value,
and why the node's document share is relative to its group rather than the
whole cluster. The existing reference entry did not state the formula or the
common pitfall where minTargetHits silently overrides totalTargetHits after
moving to a grouped topology.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5
---
en/reference/querying/yql.html | 13 +++++++++++++
1 file changed, 13 insertions(+)
diff --git a/en/reference/querying/yql.html b/en/reference/querying/yql.html
index 28865f95a1..f4bb72803e 100644
--- a/en/reference/querying/yql.html
+++ b/en/reference/querying/yql.html
@@ -2277,6 +2277,19 @@ Annotations
and this parameter protects against that when totalTargetHits leads to some node with
little content otherwise getting a low targetHits.
+
+ Each content node resolves its per-node target hits as
+ max(minTargetHits, ceil(totalTargetHits × share)), where share
+ is the node's share of the active documents in the
+ group serving the query - not across
+ the whole cluster, since a query is dispatched to a single group. A node that has just joined
+ the cluster, or is still receiving documents after a topology change, temporarily holds little
+ content and would get too few hits from totalTargetHits alone without this floor.
+
+ {% include note.html content="Setting minTargetHits higher than a node's expected share of
+ totalTargetHits makes minTargetHits the effective value, and totalTargetHits has no further
+ effect until it exceeds the floor. This is easy to hit when moving from a flat to a grouped
+ topology, since a group typically has fewer nodes than the full cluster."%}