Yes, elasticsearch, I should have recognized the "painless" scripting! This can mean the following things:
your use case is maybe unusual, would it be possible to introduce a groupby step in spark that first gathers all property updates for a vertex into one update call?
the default value of script.max_compilations_rate may be really too low for your use case, so it is worth a try increasing it (elasticsearch docs do not discourage it). I think this should be done outside janusgraph, just using the elastic API's.
the janusgraph code for calling elasticsearch with scripts is suboptimal; I did not investigate this other than checking for existing issues (none). This option will not help you now; if you want to create an issue on janusgraph github, please specify how your system setup is, what the update rates are, etc. You would also have to check whether your issue also holds for janusgraph 0.4.1 or 0.5.3 because 0.3.x is end of life.
