# Max number of segments in elasticsearch
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/max-number-of-segments-in-elasticsearch/62210
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [October 4, 2016, 7:26pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/max-number-of-segments-in-elasticsearch/62210 "2016-10-04T19:26:56Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@suanmeiguo](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/suanmeiguo)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2016, 7:26pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/max-number-of-segments-in-elasticsearch/62210/1 "2016-10-04T19:26:56Z")
Is there a parameter in elasticsearch to set the max number of underlying segments in the whole cluster? Or is there any parameters about segments?
I know there's a `max_num_segments` when using the optimize API, but I'm looking for parameters that controls segments in general.
For example, is there a parameter to control how many segments you can have in each index? or how often to merge the segments (instead of waiting a segment become too big)?
Appreciate!
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### Author:  [@softwaredoug](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/softwaredoug)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2016, 7:36pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/max-number-of-segments-in-elasticsearch/62210/2 "2016-10-04T19:36:23Z")
Sort of. Typically you can get close to controlling how segments are laid out with the [merge policy](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.4/index-modules-merge.html). Which is deprecated, and in fact almost all these settings are [removed in 2.x](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index-modules-merge.html) in favor of an auto-throttling API.
Generally speaking is, best practice is not focus on narrowing down to just one or few segments. The tiered segments have advantages with parallelism and "graduating" long-lived documents to bigger/more stable segments (much like a garbage collector).
Is there a higher level problem you're trying to solve? Like indexing/search is slow, etc?
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### Author:  [@suanmeiguo](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/suanmeiguo)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2016, 8:47pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/max-number-of-segments-in-elasticsearch/62210/3 "2016-10-04T20:47:57Z")
Yeah basically I have a giant index (300M rows and about 500G all primary shards combined), and I'm constantly updating (80%) and inserting (20%) into it.
The concern is, when the index grows too large, we're gonna have too many segments or too big segments, which leads to a performance decrease. So I'm trying to figure out if this will be an issue, and how I can resolve it.
Thanks for the quick response!
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### Author:  [@warkolm](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/warkolm)
#### Post date: [October 5, 2016, 8:32am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/max-number-of-segments-in-elasticsearch/62210/4 "2016-10-05T08:32:08Z")
You might be better off splitting the index?
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 5, 2017, 10:14pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/max-number-of-segments-in-elasticsearch/62210/5 "2017-07-05T22:14:51Z")