Getting total term frequency throughout entire index (Elasticsearch)

Question

I am trying to calculate the total number of times a particular term occurs throughout an entire index (term collection frequency). I have attempted to do so through the use of

Answer 1

The reason for the difference in the count is because term vectors are not accurate unless the index in question has a single shard. For indexes with multiple shards, the documents are distributed all over the shards, hence the frequency returned isn't the total but from a randomly selected shard.

Thus, the returned frequency is just a relative measure and not the absolute value you expect. see the Behaviour section. To test this, you can create a single shard index and request the frequency (it should give you the actual total).