# Sharding in ES

**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/sharding-in-es/131446
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [May 11, 2018, 9:21am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/sharding-in-es/131446 "2018-05-11T09:21:45Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![vaibhav\_gulati](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/f07891/32.png) [@vaibhav\_gulati](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/vaibhav_gulati)
#### Post date: [May 11, 2018, 9:21am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/sharding-in-es/131446/1 "2018-05-11T09:21:45Z")

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"Each document in your  
index belongs to a single primary shard, so the number of primary shards that you  
have determines the maximum amount of data that your index can hold."

can anyone help me understand this?

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### Author: ![dadoonet](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/dadoonet/32/137187_2.png) [@dadoonet](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/dadoonet)
#### Post date: [May 11, 2018, 9:35am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/sharding-in-es/131446/2 "2018-05-11T09:35:06Z")

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If a single shard can hold for example for your use case 1m documents and you have 5 primary shards, you'll be able to index up to 5m documents in your index before it reaches the limits you have.

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### Author: ![vaibhav\_gulati](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/f07891/32.png) [@vaibhav\_gulati](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/vaibhav_gulati)
#### Post date: [May 11, 2018, 11:54am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/sharding-in-es/131446/3 "2018-05-11T11:54:46Z")

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What if my harddisk is of 5GB, still I would be able to store 5m of data in my index?

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### Author: ![dadoonet](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/dadoonet/32/137187_2.png) [@dadoonet](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/dadoonet)
#### Post date: [May 11, 2018, 12:32pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/sharding-in-es/131446/4 "2018-05-11T12:32:14Z")

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It depends. But for a use case I have, I'm indexing around 250 mb for 1m documents.

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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: [May 11, 2018, 12:38pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/sharding-in-es/131446/5 "2018-05-11T12:38:31Z")

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I think Lucene limits the number of documents per shard to around 2 billion, so shards can get quite big. You are however likely to find that your ideal shard size based on query performance is smaller than that.

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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: [June 8, 2018, 12:38pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/sharding-in-es/131446/6 "2018-06-08T12:38:36Z")

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