# Max Documents in a Segment
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/max-documents-in-a-segment/156117
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [November 9, 2018, 11:50pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/max-documents-in-a-segment/156117 "2018-11-09T23:50:04Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@djtecha](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/djtecha)
#### Post date: [November 9, 2018, 11:50pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/max-documents-in-a-segment/156117/1 "2018-11-09T23:50:04Z")
I'm curious if anyone knows lucene enough to explain what the max number of documents or data size should exist in a segment. As in at what point does forcemerging an index have diminishing returns? If I have a 50GB index with 300M documents, is it better to have 1 5 or 10 Segments?
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### Author:  [@warkolm](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/warkolm)
#### Post date: [November 10, 2018, 2:19am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/max-documents-in-a-segment/156117/2 "2018-11-10T02:19:15Z")
The max doc limit works on a shard level, not a segment, and it's 2^32-1.
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### Author:  [@Christian\_Dahlqvist](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Christian_Dahlqvist)
#### Post date: [November 10, 2018, 9:02am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/max-documents-in-a-segment/156117/3 "2018-11-10T09:02:13Z")
This depends on what you are trying to achieve by the force merge. If you are looking to speed up queries I suspect you need to benchmark to see what the ideal segment size is. If you on the other hand are looking to reduce heap usage, force merging down to a single shard is always beneficial, as described in [this webinar](https://www.elastic.co/webinars/optimizing-storage-efficiency-in-elasticsearch).
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [December 8, 2018, 9:02am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/max-documents-in-a-segment/156117/4 "2018-12-08T09:02:14Z")
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