# Primary Shard Distribution

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/primary-shard-distribution/20137>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [October 8, 2014, 11:51am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/primary-shard-distribution/20137 "2014-10-08T11:51:10Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Matt\_Hanson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d2c977/32.png) [@Matt\_Hanson](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Matt_Hanson)\
**Post date:** [October 8, 2014, 11:51am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/primary-shard-distribution/20137/1 "2014-10-08T11:51:10Z")

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I have an ES cluster of 3 servers where indexes are configured with 5  
shards and 2 replicas (so, every index has 5 primary shards and 10 replica  
shards, with 5 shards allocated to each server). I have just upgraded from  
1.0.0 to 1.3.4 by stopping one server at a time, updating ES then  
re-starting it, waiting for all of the unallocated shards to initialize on  
the updated server.

Before performing the upgrade, the primary shards for each index were  
distributed evenly amongst the 3 ES servers, but now every primary shard is  
allocated to a single server. This appears to be causing an issue with  
snapshots as the server holding all of the primary shards is doing all the  
work to push a snapshot out to S3 while the other 2 servers are doing  
nothing - with even primary shard distribution each of the servers would be  
doing part of the work.

Is there a way to ask ES to re-allocate the primary shards evenly amongst  
all the servers (like you get on a new index creation) so we can spread our  
snapshot load around?

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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, 12:57am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/primary-shard-distribution/20137/2 "2017-07-06T00:57:40Z")

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Closed on July 6, 2017, 12:57am UTC