# Understanding sharding in muti-tenant collections

**URL:** <https://forum.weaviate.io/t/understanding-sharding-in-muti-tenant-collections/4335>\
**Category:** Support\
**Created:** [September 26, 2024, 4:18am UTC](https://forum.weaviate.io/t/understanding-sharding-in-muti-tenant-collections/4335 "2024-09-26T04:18:58Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![izharg](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/3da27b/32.png) [@izharg](https://forum.weaviate.io/u/izharg)\
**Post date:** [September 26, 2024, 4:18am UTC](https://forum.weaviate.io/t/understanding-sharding-in-muti-tenant-collections/4335/1 "2024-09-26T04:18:58Z")

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Hi,

I’m trying to understand how sharding works in multi-tenant collections.

When I create a regular sharded collection (without multi-tenancy) that contains 300,000 data objects on a 3-node cluster, the data is sharded, and each node holds a shard with 100,000 objects.

My understanding is that this setup doesn’t work the same way with multi-tenancy. Specifically, if I have a multi-tenant collection and one of the tenants has 300,000 records, all 300,000 records would be stored on a single shard on one node, and there’s no way to distribute them evenly across multiple nodes.

Is my understanding correct?

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**Author:** ![Shahin](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex027/user_avatar/forum.weaviate.io/shahin/32/7944_2.png) [@Shahin](https://forum.weaviate.io/u/Shahin)\
**Post date:** [September 26, 2024, 12:50pm UTC](https://forum.weaviate.io/t/understanding-sharding-in-muti-tenant-collections/4335/2 "2024-09-26T12:50:05Z")

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Hello @izharg,

Welcome to our community and it’s great to have you here with us 🙂

Yes, your understanding is correct.

In a multi-tenant setup, each tenant is allocated its own dedicated shard, meaning that all data for a specific tenant resides in a single shard on one node. If a tenant has 300,000 records, they would all be stored within that one shard.

Multi-tenant sharding is designed to keep each tenant’s data isolated within a single shard.

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**Author:** ![jinx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c6cbf5/32.png) [@jinx](https://forum.weaviate.io/u/jinx)\
**Post date:** [February 26, 2025, 5:09am UTC](https://forum.weaviate.io/t/understanding-sharding-in-muti-tenant-collections/4335/3 "2025-02-26T05:09:59Z")

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But if I have 3 tenants each with 100,000 records, in a 3 node cluster, will the shards for these 3 tenants be distributed across the 3 nodes? Tenant 1 shard on node 1, tenant 2 shard on node 2, …

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**Author:** ![Shahin](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex027/user_avatar/forum.weaviate.io/shahin/32/7944_2.png) [@Shahin](https://forum.weaviate.io/u/Shahin)\
**Post date:** [February 26, 2025, 9:23am UTC](https://forum.weaviate.io/t/understanding-sharding-in-muti-tenant-collections/4335/4 "2025-02-26T09:23:38Z")

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Distributed across our 3-node cluster:

**Node 1** :

• Tenant 1 (shard): 100,000 records

• Tenant 2 (shard): 100,000 records

• Tenant 3 (shard): 100,000 records

**Node 2** (Same as Node 1):

• Tenant 1 (shard): 100,000 records

• Tenant 2 (shard): 100,000 records

• Tenant 3 (shard): 100,000 records

**Node 3** (Same as Node1):

• Tenant 1 (shard): 100,000 records

• Tenant 2 (shard): 100,000 records

• Tenant 3 (shard): 100,000 records

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**Author:** ![jinx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c6cbf5/32.png) [@jinx](https://forum.weaviate.io/u/jinx)\
**Post date:** [March 3, 2025, 3:55am UTC](https://forum.weaviate.io/t/understanding-sharding-in-muti-tenant-collections/4335/5 "2025-03-03T03:55:30Z")

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Ohh okay, understood. Thank you!