# Best practice with eleastic serach?

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/best-practice-with-eleastic-serach/4817>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [July 8, 2011, 5:49am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/best-practice-with-eleastic-serach/4817 "2011-07-08T05:49:14Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Michael\_Rennecke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5e9695/32.png) [@Michael\_Rennecke](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Michael_Rennecke)\
**Post date:** [July 8, 2011, 5:49am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/best-practice-with-eleastic-serach/4817/1 "2011-07-08T05:49:14Z")

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Hello,

I'm new with elastic search. I will build a productive Index with many  
TB of Data and billions of documents. In my first test I build a  
cluster with 128 shards, 2 replicas on 6 machines with 16 GB RAM and  
SSDs.

The recovery of one node works fine, but I think it becomes slower, if  
the number of shards is higher. Can I increase the speed of the  
recovery?

If I shutdown the cluster with  
$ curl -XPOST '[http://localhost:9200/\_shutdown](http://localhost:9200/_shutdown)'  
then takes the restart of the cluster very long. The testindex has a  
of size 871.7gb (2539gb) with documents 6750481 (6750481). After the  
restart are the shards in the state recovering or unassigned. The  
primary shards have a very bad distribution. Can I change the  
distribution of the primary shards? Because, elastic search write in  
the primary shards and I have a very high write throughput on the  
index. I think, that the distribution of the primary shards increase  
the write performance.

Has anybody experience with a maximum size of a shard or the maximum  
number of shards on one machine? What is better, one datanode with may  
memory on one machine or many datanodes with less memory on one  
machine? My goal is a high availability, scalability, read- and write  
throughput.

Thanks,  
Michael

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**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, 4:01am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/best-practice-with-eleastic-serach/4817/2 "2017-07-06T04:01:19Z")

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