# How many shards should I put in a node？

**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-many-shards-should-i-put-in-a-node/27544
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [August 18, 2015, 2:19am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-many-shards-should-i-put-in-a-node/27544 "2015-08-18T02:19:23Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 2

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### Author: ![warkolm](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/warkolm/32/39224_2.png) [@warkolm](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/warkolm)
#### Post date: [August 18, 2015, 2:52am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-many-shards-should-i-put-in-a-node/27544/2 "2015-08-18T02:52:31Z")

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We don't recommend having shards over 50GB as it just makes reallocation harder than it should be. You can probably go larger if you only have a single node, but don't forget that to change the number of shards for an index, you need to reindex that entire index.

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