# Slow Shard Assignment
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/slow-shard-assignment/10266
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [January 8, 2013, 6:09pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/slow-shard-assignment/10266 "2013-01-08T18:09:32Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@kelaban](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/kelaban)
#### Post date: [January 8, 2013, 6:09pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/slow-shard-assignment/10266/1 "2013-01-08T18:09:32Z")
I have a job that creates a new version on an index every morning then deletes the old version of the index when it is done. About 3/7 days per week this job fails. What I am observing is that sometimes when trying to create the new index shards are either not being assigned at all or taking a long time to be assigned (around 10 minutes).
The index is small (~100k entries) and cluster setup is really simple. There are 4 data nodes in the cluster and the index is 1 shard with 3 replicas. So there should be one primary shard and one replica on each of the rest of the 3 remaining nodes in the cluster.
Any insight on why this is happening would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2017, 2:57am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/slow-shard-assignment/10266/2 "2017-07-06T02:57:22Z")