# Shard assignment on single instance? shard size vs. performance?

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/shard-assignment-on-single-instance-shard-size-vs-performance/78497>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [March 14, 2017, 11:04am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/shard-assignment-on-single-instance-shard-size-vs-performance/78497 "2017-03-14T11:04:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![asp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9fc348/32.png) [@asp](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/asp)\
**Post date:** [March 14, 2017, 11:04am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/shard-assignment-on-single-instance-shard-size-vs-performance/78497/1 "2017-03-14T11:04:30Z")

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Hi all,

we are running a single of elk.  
We have 3 indexes prefixes, each holding information of some logfile types.

On single node, will more shards improve speed (especially on searching data via kibana)?

Thanks, Andreas

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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:** [March 14, 2017, 1:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/shard-assignment-on-single-instance-shard-size-vs-performance/78497/2 "2017-03-14T13:15:47Z")

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As each query/aggregation runs single-threaded against a shard, but shards can be processed in parallel, the shard size will affect the minimum query latency. Having a large number of small shards however a lot of shards to be searched, which can slow down queries significantly as well. This is why we generally recommend you benchmark in order to find the ideal shard size, as this can differ depending on your data and queries/aggregations against this data.

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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:** [April 11, 2017, 1:16pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/shard-assignment-on-single-instance-shard-size-vs-performance/78497/3 "2017-04-11T13:16:08Z")

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