# Idle way of creating indeces

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/idle-way-of-creating-indeces/5815>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [November 8, 2011, 4:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/idle-way-of-creating-indeces/5815 "2011-11-08T16:15:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![avinash\_nalluri](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/97f17d/32.png) [@avinash\_nalluri](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/avinash_nalluri)\
**Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 4:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/idle-way-of-creating-indeces/5815/1 "2011-11-08T16:15:15Z")

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Hi,  
Can anyone please tell me what is an idle number of shards to be  
created in a particular index for large data operations and how does  
those affects querying mechanisms(speed) also,considering the fact  
that we may scale our elastic search cluster from single machine what  
we are using now to multiple(more than 3) machines.

Thanks,  
avinash

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**Author:** ![Karussell1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/50afbb/32.png) [@Karussell1](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Karussell1)\
**Post date:** [November 10, 2011, 1:34pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/idle-way-of-creating-indeces/5815/2 "2011-11-10T13:34:39Z")

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That really depends on your data. Querying can be potentially faster  
as three machines can work on the same query but I doubt this is the  
case as every machine has at least 3 core nowadays and network is the  
most limiting resource. I would try (hard) to split the index so that  
you can dynamically add and remove indices instead of sharding. If  
this isn't an option changing the shards is just a re-index away 😉  
(relative easy via scan search)

Peter.

On Nov 8, 5:15 pm, "avinash.nalluri" [avinash.nall...@gmail.com](mailto:avinash.nall...@gmail.com)  
wrote:

> Hi,  
> Can anyone please tell me what is an idle number of shards to be  
> created in a particular index for large data operations and how does  
> those affects querying mechanisms(speed) also,considering the fact  
> that we may scale our Elasticsearch cluster from single machine what  
> we are using now to multiple(more than 3) machines.
> 
> Thanks,  
> avinash

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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, 3:49am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/idle-way-of-creating-indeces/5815/3 "2017-07-06T03:49:11Z")

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Closed on July 6, 2017, 3:49am UTC