# Reason behind "Index creation no longer defaults to five shard"

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/reason-behind-index-creation-no-longer-defaults-to-five-shard/230409>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [April 29, 2020, 5:01pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/reason-behind-index-creation-no-longer-defaults-to-five-shard/230409 "2020-04-29T17:01:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![nages](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/nages/32/46943_2.png) [@nages](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/nages)\
**Post date:** [April 29, 2020, 5:01pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/reason-behind-index-creation-no-longer-defaults-to-five-shard/230409/1 "2020-04-29T17:01:23Z")

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What was the reasoning behind ""Index creation no longer defaults to five shard but one shard"

So far, the assumption was , more shards = more scalability = more parallelism  
Isnt that change defeating the whole purpose of distributed systems like ES ?

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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:** [April 29, 2020, 5:17pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/reason-behind-index-creation-no-longer-defaults-to-five-shard/230409/2 "2020-04-29T17:17:13Z")

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A lot of users use time-based indices and this setting led to a lot of systems being severely oversharded which caused a lot of problems. From that perspective 1 is a much better default.

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**Author:** ![nages](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/nages/32/46943_2.png) [@nages](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/nages)\
**Post date:** [April 29, 2020, 5:32pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/reason-behind-index-creation-no-longer-defaults-to-five-shard/230409/3 "2020-04-29T17:32:36Z")

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KISS, an acronym for "keep it simple, stupid" triumphs again 🙂[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS\_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle)

Start with small , increase gradually on demand

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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:** [April 29, 2020, 6:28pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/reason-behind-index-creation-no-longer-defaults-to-five-shard/230409/4 "2020-04-29T18:28:33Z")

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Yes, if you do not have a use case with time-based indices, 5 is probably not the right number anyway.

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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:** [May 27, 2020, 6:28pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/reason-behind-index-creation-no-longer-defaults-to-five-shard/230409/5 "2020-05-27T18:28:38Z")

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