# Is performance affected by indexing naming scheme?

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-performance-affected-by-indexing-naming-scheme/71698>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [January 16, 2017, 8:45am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-performance-affected-by-indexing-naming-scheme/71698 "2017-01-16T08:45:33Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![manbearpig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f05b48/32.png) [@manbearpig](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/manbearpig)\
**Post date:** [January 16, 2017, 8:45am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-performance-affected-by-indexing-naming-scheme/71698/1 "2017-01-16T08:45:33Z")

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Supposed I have multiple identical sets of hardware, and the same index settings (same shard, same replica). They are both ingesting the same type of data.

With set A, I only have 1 index and 1 type, e.g. /myIndex/myType

With set B, I have a scheme where the index is separated by dates e.g. /indexDate\_xxxx/myType where xxxx is month and year for example /indexDate\_0117 for January 2017, /index\_Date\_0217 for February 2017

My question is would there be any performance difference between set A and set B?

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**Author:** ![tanguy](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/tanguy/32/6030_2.png) [@tanguy](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/tanguy)\
**Post date:** [January 16, 2017, 10:28am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-performance-affected-by-indexing-naming-scheme/71698/2 "2017-01-16T10:28:45Z")

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Hi,

As always, _it depends_. With a small set of documents, you should not notice any performance difference between solution A and B. But both solution won't scale in the same way and both have pro and cons.

I strongly encourage you to read the "Designing for Scale" chapter of the Definitive Guide (see [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/scale.html](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/scale.html)) which is short and have all the answers.

Also, I'm curious to know the lifecycle of the documents: are they stored and queried forever? Are they deleted after a given period of time? Are they updated?

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**Author:** ![manbearpig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f05b48/32.png) [@manbearpig](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/manbearpig)\
**Post date:** [January 21, 2017, 5:09am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-performance-affected-by-indexing-naming-scheme/71698/3 "2017-01-21T05:09:08Z")

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Wow thank for you for the prompt reply!

Thank you for the recommendation. I will be dealing with very large set of documents. In particular emails and chats.

They will be stored and queried forever and they are seldom updated.

Thank you again

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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:** [February 18, 2017, 5:09am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-performance-affected-by-indexing-naming-scheme/71698/4 "2017-02-18T05:09:14Z")

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