# Adding shards to reduce average size **URL:** \ **Category:** Elasticsearch\ **Created:** [February 19, 2015, 4:06am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/adding-shards-to-reduce-average-size/22257 "2015-02-19T04:06:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Jonathan\_Foy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/8edcca/32.png) [@Jonathan\_Foy](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Jonathan_Foy)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2015, 4:06am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/adding-shards-to-reduce-average-size/22257/1 "2015-02-19T04:06:58Z")
Hello I have been struggling off-and-on for months now to run an apparently highly updated ES cluster on as little hardware as possible. There's more history here [http://elasticsearch-users.115913.n3.nabble.com/Sustainable-way-to-regularly-purge-deleted-docs-td4062259.html](http://elasticsearch-users.115913.n3.nabble.com/Sustainable-way-to-regularly-purge-deleted-docs-td4062259.html), but the overall issue is that my use case involves lots of frequent updates, which results in a growing percentage of deleted docs, and thus more RAM needed to handle the same dataset. I want to run a possible change in index structure by the group to get any possible recommendations. Ultimately the growing delete percentage seems to be related to both the size of the shards in question, and a hard-coded ratio in the Lucene Tiered Merge Policy code. As it turns out, the merge code will not consider merging a segment until the non-deleted portion of the segment is smaller than half of the max\_merged\_segment parameter (someone please correct me if I'm wrong here, and I wish it had been easier to discover this). This does not appear to be configurable in any version of Lucene in which I've looked. This explains why bumping max\_merged\_segment stupidly high can keep the deleted percentage low; the larger segments are considered for merging when they have a smaller percentage of deleted docs. This also explains why my shards grew to be ~45% deleted docs. To work around this, I'm considering reindexing with 3 or 4 times the number of shards on the same number of nodes to shrink the shards to a more manageable size, but want to make sure that the overhead from additional shards will not counter the benefits from having smaller shards. Note that I AM using routing, which I assume should reduce much of the over-sharding overhead. The index in question now has six shards with one replica each. Shard sizes ranges from 20-30 GB. Currently this is running on six r3.xlarge (30.5 GB RAM, 20GB allocated to ES) instances. Ideally I'd be running on no more than four. With a low enough delete percentage I think I can even run on three. My theory is that if I reduce the size of the shards to 5-10 GB max, then I can set the max\_merged\_segment high enough that the deleted docs will be merged out quickly, and I'll be able to handle the size of the merges in question without issue. With the existing setup, even on six nodes, I occasionally run into merge memory issues with large max\_merged\_segment sizes (13 GB currently I think). Does this seem reasonable? I'd be looking at 36-48 shards, counting replicas, being spread across 3-4 nodes, so 12-18 each. Thoughts? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "elasticsearch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [elasticsearch+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:elasticsearch+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com). To view this discussion on the web visit [https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/elasticsearch/39668eef-db62-4ffc-968d-88e04f1712bd%40googlegroups.com](https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/elasticsearch/39668eef-db62-4ffc-968d-88e04f1712bd%40googlegroups.com). For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/d/optout](https://groups.google.com/d/optout). ---
**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, 12:31am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/adding-shards-to-reduce-average-size/22257/2 "2017-07-06T00:31:42Z")