# How many shards? **URL:** \ **Category:** Elasticsearch\ **Created:** [November 8, 2011, 4:06pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-many-shards/5814 "2011-11-08T16:06:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![mfeingold](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ecb155/32.png) [@mfeingold](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/mfeingold)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 4:06pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-many-shards/5814/1 "2011-11-08T16:06:16Z")
For a given box - let us say 8 cores, 16G RAM, is there a correlation between number of shards and the performance (response time/ throughput). My guess is that number of shards should be the same as number of cores - is it true? dos it matter? ---
**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:** [November 9, 2011, 11:06am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-many-shards/5814/2 "2011-11-09T11:06:02Z")
A single shard can utilize several cores happily. Its more a question of load as each shard is a Lucene index, which comes with an overhead. Its hard to answer such a question, you will need to run some tests as it depends on the type of queries, type of data you index. But, the more shards you have, the more resources that will be used on the machine. On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 6:06 PM, Michael Feingold [mfeingold@hill30.com](mailto:mfeingold@hill30.com)wrote: > For a given box - let us say 8 cores, 16G RAM, is there a correlation > between number of shards and the performance (response time/ > throughput). My guess is that number of shards should be the same as > number of cores - is it true? dos it matter? ---
**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, 3:49am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-many-shards/5814/3 "2017-07-06T03:49:20Z")