# How to start out with a new cluster regarding shards?

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-start-out-with-a-new-cluster-regarding-shards/124982>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [March 21, 2018, 12:36pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-start-out-with-a-new-cluster-regarding-shards/124982 "2018-03-21T12:36:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![\_markus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/_/ecb155/32.png) [@\_markus](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/_markus)\
**Post date:** [March 21, 2018, 12:36pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-start-out-with-a-new-cluster-regarding-shards/124982/1 "2018-03-21T12:36:13Z")

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I'll soon start a new cluster with latest 6.x series, here are some of the key points:

- one index
- will use two "types" because I need the `join` capability
- will have ~22mio parents and ~240mio children documents
- parent documents have more fields and will be "bigger" in general
- the overall size of the indexed will be ~300GB initially
- number of nodes isn't yet decided
- I would classify the growth as "slow but linear"
- update frequency is multiple times per second and it's likely that the update to existing documents will be in the same ratio to the insertion of completely new documents

I understand I will need to run benchmarks any way but upfront would like to get a feeling what an appropriate shard size could be. The default of `5` doesn't sound good to me, having a single shard size of ~60GB etc.

Any suggestion where to start? Are 50 shards ȧ 6GB too many of them? I understand this can speed up indexing but will slow down searching as it has to wait on results of 50 shards.

If someone has experience with a similar sized set up and would like to share the insights, that would be great.

thanks,

- Markus

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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:** [April 18, 2018, 12:36pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-start-out-with-a-new-cluster-regarding-shards/124982/2 "2018-04-18T12:36:35Z")

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Closed on April 18, 2018, 12:36pm UTC

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