elasticsearch/docs/reference/troubleshooting/data/increase-shard-limit.asciidoc

[[increase-shard-limit]]
== Total number of shards for an index on a single node exceeded 

Elasticsearch tries to take advantage of all the available resources by 
distributing data (index shards) among nodes in the cluster.

Users might want to influence this data distribution by configuring the <<total-shards-per-node, index.routing.allocation.total_shards_per_node>> 
index setting to a custom value (for e.g. `1` in case of a highly trafficked index).
Various configurations limiting how many shards an index can have located on one node
can lead to shards being unassigned due to the cluster not having enough nodes to
satisfy the index configuration.

In order to fix this follow the next steps:

include::{es-repo-dir}/tab-widgets/troubleshooting/data/total-shards-per-node-widget.asciidoc[]