# Large number of indexes

**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/large-number-of-indexes/28853
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [September 8, 2015, 4:16pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/large-number-of-indexes/28853 "2015-09-08T16:16:38Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 2

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### Author: ![Christian\_Dahlqvist](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/christian_dahlqvist/32/4617_2.png) [@Christian\_Dahlqvist](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Christian_Dahlqvist)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2015, 6:42pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/large-number-of-indexes/28853/2 "2015-09-08T18:42:23Z")

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Each shard in Elasticsearch is a Lucene instance, which uses a certain amount of file handles, memory and CPU cycles behind the scenes. Shards are therefore not for free, and having a very large number of small indices is generally a bad idea as it does not scale well. Discussions on this topic can be found [in this previous question](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/multi-tenancy-performance/3732) as well as [in this blog post](https://www.elastic.co/blog/found-sizing-elasticsearch#index-per-user).

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