# Adding shards as the volume of data grows

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/adding-shards-as-the-volume-of-data-grows/4693>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [June 23, 2011, 3:49pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/adding-shards-as-the-volume-of-data-grows/4693 "2011-06-23T15:49:10Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Spring\_Ninja](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/spring_ninja/32/2719_2.png) [@Spring\_Ninja](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Spring_Ninja)\
**Post date:** [June 23, 2011, 3:49pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/adding-shards-as-the-volume-of-data-grows/4693/1 "2011-06-23T15:49:10Z")

</div>

Hi all,

Is there some documentation or group topic that describes when, how  
and the impacts of adding new shards to an index, either because the  
index is becoming too big or because we need to add additional ES  
nodes in the cluster?

We are building a multi-tenants Web app. We have one index per entity  
type. We will shard each index as appropriate (volume, update rate and  
ratio, update contention, etc) and we will use document routing to map  
tenants to shards for each index.

So in short, what is a good strategy to monitor shards performance,  
add shards when necessary, possibly re-shard the index and remap  
tenant ids to shard ids?

Thank you very much for your insights!

Remy

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![kimchy](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/kimchy/32/44952_2.png) [@kimchy](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/kimchy)\
**Post date:** [June 24, 2011, 9:46am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/adding-shards-as-the-volume-of-data-grows/4693/2 "2011-06-24T09:46:51Z")

</div>

How much a shard can "take you" really depends on several aspects, including number of documents, size, type of search requests against it, facets executed on it and so on. It requires some planning in advance which usually end up with a rough document count per shard.

On Thursday, June 23, 2011 at 6:49 PM, Spring Ninja wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Is there some documentation or group topic that describes when, how  
> and the impacts of adding new shards to an index, either because the  
> index is becoming too big or because we need to add additional ES  
> nodes in the cluster?
> 
> We are building a multi-tenants Web app. We have one index per entity  
> type. We will shard each index as appropriate (volume, update rate and  
> ratio, update contention, etc) and we will use document routing to map  
> tenants to shards for each index.
> 
> So in short, what is a good strategy to monitor shards performance,  
> add shards when necessary, possibly re-shard the index and remap  
> tenant ids to shard ids?
> 
> Thank you very much for your insights!
> 
> Remy

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 4:02am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/adding-shards-as-the-volume-of-data-grows/4693/3 "2017-07-06T04:02:44Z")

</div>

Closed on July 6, 2017, 4:02am UTC