# Active\_primary\_shards spontaneously doubled?
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/active-primary-shards-spontaneously-doubled/793
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [May 17, 2015, 1:46am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/active-primary-shards-spontaneously-doubled/793 "2015-05-17T01:46:12Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@rott](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/rott)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2015, 1:46am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/active-primary-shards-spontaneously-doubled/793/1 "2015-05-17T01:46:12Z")
Hi, I have a four-node cluster configured with 8 primary shards and 1 replica. I'm using the Java client, but the equivalent yml file would look like this on each node:
```
cluster.name: clusterA
node.name: ca1
node.master: true
node.data: true
index.number_of_shards: 8
index.number_of_replicas: 1
path.data: /analyticsData
bootstrap.mlockall: true
discovery.zen.minimum_master_nodes: 3
discovery.zen.ping.multicast.enabled: false
discovery.zen.ping.unicast.hosts: ["node1[9300-9399]", "node2[9300-9399]", "node3[9300-9399]", "node4[9300-9399]"]
```
Of course node.name would differ per node.
Once three nodes are up (due to minimum\_master\_nodes setting), all is well. Fourth node comes up, and all is well; \_cluster/health says:
```
{
cluster_name: "clusterA",
status: "green",
timed_out: false,
number_of_nodes: 4,
number_of_data_nodes: 4,
active_primary_shards: 8,
active_shards: 16,
relocating_shards: 0,
initializing_shards: 0,
unassigned_shards: 0
}
```
At some point node "ca4" is killed (kill -9, or some other possibly unfriendly way), and restarted. The results:
```
{
cluster_name: "clusterA",
status: "green",
timed_out: false,
number_of_nodes: 4,
number_of_data_nodes: 4,
active_primary_shards: 16,
active_shards: 32,
relocating_shards: 0,
initializing_shards: 0,
unassigned_shards: 0
}
```
????????
How is this possible? How do we spontaneously have double primary shards? Where do I even start looking for clues to this situation? This is ES 1.1.1.
Thanks.
---
### Author:  [@warkolm](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/warkolm)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2015, 11:50pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/active-primary-shards-spontaneously-doubled/793/2 "2015-05-17T23:50:08Z")
Does the number of primaries drop or does it stay the same?
I'd suggest an upgrade to 1.5.2, 1.1.1 is getting a little old.
---
### Author:  [@rott](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/rott)
#### Post date: [May 19, 2015, 1:57am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/active-primary-shards-spontaneously-doubled/793/3 "2015-05-19T01:57:35Z")
Well my question turned out to be dumb. I was assisting another team, and lacked complete information. Turns out they were starting one of the nodes against an existing path.data, which of course had two indices. Hence 8 shards \* 2 indices = 16 primary shards. Sigh. Thanks.
---
### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2017, 12:13am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/active-primary-shards-spontaneously-doubled/793/4 "2017-07-06T00:13:24Z")