qdrant-horizontal-scaling

A guide to horizontal scaling Qdrant, which means adding machines and distributing data across them. It explains concepts such as shards, which divide data, and replicas, which keep extra copies.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to choose between scaling up and out, plan nodes, shards, and replicas, and reason about capacity, maintenance, and downtime.
Why use it?
It helps decide when one machine is no longer enough or when fault tolerance, tenant separation, or more disk input/output capacity is required.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/secondlifes/code-intel/horizontal-scaling
Any agent
npx skills add SecondLifes/code-intel --skill horizontal-scaling
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/SecondLifes/code-intel

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 640 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00068 $0.00640
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.00320
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00128
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00064

Measured 2d ago against content hash bca45e1976da, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

qdrant-horizontal-scaling scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to qdrant-horizontal-scaling — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.agents/skills/qdrant-scaling/scaling-data-volume/horizontal-scaling/SKILL.md · 48 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 48 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

What to Do When Qdrant Needs More Capacity

Vertical first: simpler operations, no network overhead, good up to ~100M vectors per node depending on dimensions and quantization. Horizontal when: data exceeds single node capacity, need fault tolerance, need to isolate tenants, or IOPS-bound (more nodes = more independent IOPS).

Most basic distributed configuration

  • 3 nodes, 3 shards with replication_factor: 2 for zero-downtime scaling

Minimum of 3 nodes is important for consensus and fault tolerance. With 3 nodes, you can lose 1 node without downtime. With 2 nodes, losing 1 node causes downtime for collection operations. Replication factor of 2 means each shard has 1 replica, so you have 2 copies of data. This allows for zero-downtime scaling and maintenance. With replication_factor: 1, zero-downtime is not guaranteed even for point-level operations, and cluster maintenance requires downtime.

Choosing number of shards

Shards are the unit of data distribution. More shards allows more nodes and better distribution, but adds overhead. Fewer shards reduces overhead but limits horizontal scaling.

For cluster of 3-6 nodes the recommended shard count is 6-12. This allows for 2-4 shards per node, which balances distribution and overhead.

Changing number of shards

Use when: shard count isn't evenly divisible by node count, causing uneven distribution, or need to rebalance.

Resharding is expensive and time-consuming, it should be used as a last resort if regular data distribution is not possible. Resharding is designed to be transparent for user operations, updates and searches should still work during resharding with some small performance impact.

But resharding operation itself is time-consuming and requires to move large amounts of data between nodes.

  • Available in Qdrant Cloud Resharding
  • Resharding is not available for self-hosted deployments.

Better alternatives: over-provision shards initially, or spin up new cluster with correct config and migrate data.

Read the full file on GitHub · 48 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 48 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A bca45e1976da

Subscribe to this mod's changes

qdrant-horizontal-scaling is a skill published in the GitHub repository SecondLifes/code-intel (2 stars, last pushed 22d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 640 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to qdrant-horizontal-scaling, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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