# Best practice for index configuration
**URL:** https://community.graylog.org/t/best-practice-for-index-configuration/984
**Category:** Graylog Central (peer support)
**Created:** [April 29, 2017, 5:11pm UTC](https://community.graylog.org/t/best-practice-for-index-configuration/984 "2017-04-29T17:11:02Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@arnaud](https://community.graylog.org/u/arnaud)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2017, 5:11pm UTC](https://community.graylog.org/t/best-practice-for-index-configuration/984/1 "2017-04-29T17:11:02Z")
Hello everybody,
I come back with a new question about how to configure indexs into Graylog?
The thing is that I know that I want set the retention by size, cause I have for the moment one elasticsearch node with 200Go usable.
But, I don’t know if it’s better to have few indexs with large size or lot of index with small size. I started with 5Go per index with 40 indexs. But maybe it’s better to have 200 indexs of 1Go?
Could you explain to me the best practice for a better optimisation?
Also, I have the same question about the number of shards, I kept the default value:4. Does it have any impact on the performance even on a single node?
Thanks!
Arnaud
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### Author:  [@jochen](https://community.graylog.org/u/jochen)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2017, 10:27am UTC](https://community.graylog.org/t/best-practice-for-index-configuration/984/2 "2017-05-01T10:27:28Z")
Please refer to the following documents:
- [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/2.4/\_basic\_concepts.html](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/2.4/_basic_concepts.html)
- [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/2.x/capacity-planning.html](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/2.x/capacity-planning.html)
- [https://qbox.io/blog/optimizing-elasticsearch-how-many-shards-per-index](https://qbox.io/blog/optimizing-elasticsearch-how-many-shards-per-index)
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### Author:  [@arnaud](https://community.graylog.org/u/arnaud)
#### Post date: [May 2, 2017, 2:05pm UTC](https://community.graylog.org/t/best-practice-for-index-configuration/984/3 "2017-05-02T14:05:11Z")
Thanks Jochen,
I’ll dive into those documentations. I thought there were general classical rules to apply.
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### Author:  [@macko003](https://community.graylog.org/u/macko003)
#### Post date: [January 29, 2019, 12:48pm UTC](https://community.graylog.org/t/best-practice-for-index-configuration/984/4 "2019-01-29T12:48:35Z")
> **[How many shards should I have in my Elasticsearch cluster?
| Elastic](https://www.elastic.co/de/blog/how-many-shards-should-i-have-in-my-elasticsearch-cluster)**
>
> Elasticsearch is a very versatile platform, that supports a variety of use cases, and provides great flexibility around data organisation and replication strategies. This flexibility can however somet...
It is full with useful information about this topic.