# Index Shard Number in Poor Performing Setup

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/index-shard-number-in-poor-performing-setup/17438>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [May 9, 2014, 9:10pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/index-shard-number-in-poor-performing-setup/17438 "2014-05-09T21:10:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![webish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/919ad9/32.png) [@webish](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/webish)\
**Post date:** [May 9, 2014, 9:10pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/index-shard-number-in-poor-performing-setup/17438/1 "2014-05-09T21:10:28Z")

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I'm seeing 40ms response times for queries using term and a custom ID field  
such as myId: 1234

I've inherited an Elastic Search database and application code. Currently  
there are two nodes and two main indexes. Index "User" is user profile  
data and Index "News" is event date in time series.

When running jmeter concurrency tests I'm seeing a very linear increase in  
response time to any any API that contains Elastic Search queries.  
Response time starts around 300ms and increases to 22s for a concurrency  
of 35!!!

There are many issues that have been uncovered.

Index "User" has 15 shards and 1 replica. ~2M docs

Index "News" has 15 shards and 1 replica. ~10M docs

The news index is going to partitioned to smaller indexes perhaps per day.  
That work has NOT began yet.

However, I think the shard size is far too large. The default being  
something like 5 shards 1 replica. It's my understanding that a large  
shard number on a single node decreases performance significantly. In our  
case, that means 7 and 8 shards per index on two nodes.

Is it possible for me to migrate the index to a new one with less shards?  
Would this be recommended?

Thanks!!!!

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<div class="post-metadata">

**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, 1:30am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/index-shard-number-in-poor-performing-setup/17438/2 "2017-07-06T01:30:26Z")

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