# How much time takes for shards rebalancing for adding a new node? **URL:** \ **Category:** Elasticsearch\ **Created:** [January 5, 2017, 4:39pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-much-time-takes-for-shards-rebalancing-for-adding-a-new-node/70710 "2017-01-05T16:39:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![robertchen117](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/edb3f5/32.png) [@robertchen117](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/robertchen117)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2017, 4:39pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-much-time-takes-for-shards-rebalancing-for-adding-a-new-node/70710/1 "2017-01-05T16:39:26Z")
how much time takes for shards rebalancing for adding a new node? Is the cluster ready for use immediately when adding a new node? Anyone did this test before? ---
**Author:** ![mikemccand](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f04885/32.png) [@mikemccand](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/mikemccand)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2017, 6:28pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-much-time-takes-for-shards-rebalancing-for-adding-a-new-node/70710/2 "2017-01-05T18:28:13Z")
Yes you can use the cluster immediately upon adding a new node ... the shard rebalancing is effectively a background operation, and the existing nodes will service indexing/searching requests until the new node finishes copying each shard. The time taken to finish rebalancing is in proportion to how large the shards are, the speed of your network, whether the bytes/sec is throttled (default varies with ES version), etc. Mike McCandless ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2017, 6:28pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-much-time-takes-for-shards-rebalancing-for-adding-a-new-node/70710/3 "2017-02-02T18:28:41Z")
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