I want to add synonyms to my index and was wondering whether to go the synonym_path route vs the synonyms route. I could not if there is a performance difference between so wanted to make sure. My synonyms file is pretty big, so I was thinking of going with the path route to prevent cluttering of the settings. So completely from a performance standpoint, will there be a performance difference if I keep the file as a path vs directly appending to the settings?
If I understood, you want to know the performance impact of creating the index setting, which includes a synonym list in the analyzer definition versus the synonym file's file path.
I am curious why you are so worried about it. It's normally a one-time process unless you update the index settings very frequently(which is very rare).
Also, you have not mentioned how many synonym words are present in your list, and even if it's in thousands, it shouldn't matter much and mainly API call will be slow based on the data-size(I believe in your case, it will be a few MB maxes) you transfer over the network.