What is Sharding?
Verified 5 August 2026
Horizontal scaling for search: each shard searches its own portion in parallel and the gateway merges the ranked results. Query latency becomes the slowest shard rather than the sum.
A well-designed gateway holds no index itself, so its resident memory is approximately zero and it can be scaled independently. A dead shard should degrade results rather than fail the request — losing a tenth of the corpus is preferable to losing the query.
Common questions
What is Sharding?
Sharding splits an index across several nodes, each holding a portion, with a gateway scattering queries and gathering results.
How does Sharding work in practice?
A well-designed gateway holds no index itself, so its resident memory is approximately zero and it can be scaled independently. A dead shard should degrade results rather than fail the request — losing a tenth of the corpus is preferable to losing the query.
See it working
The free tier is 10,000 requests a month with no card — enough to test any of this against your own queries.