Hashed Sharding
Hashed sharding uses a hashed index of a single field as the shard key to partition data across your sharded cluster.
Hashed sharding provides more even data distribution across the sharded cluster at the cost of reducing Targeted Operations vs. Broadcast Operations. Post-hash, documents with “close” shard key values are unlikely to be on the same chunk or shard - the mongos is more likely to perform Broadcast Operations to fulfill a given ranged query. mongos can target queries with equality matches to a single shard.
If you shard an empty collection using a hashed shard key, MongoDB automatically creates two empty chunks per shard, to cover the entire range of the hashed shard key value across the cluster. You can control how many chunks MongoDB creates with the numInitialChunks parameter to shardCollection or by manually creating chunks on the empty collection using the split command.
Tip
MongoDB automatically computes the hashes when resolving queries using hashed indexes. Applications do not need to compute hashes.
Hashed Sharding Shard Key
The field you choose as your hashed shard key should have a good cardinality, or large number of different values. Hashed keys are ideal for shard keys with fields that change monotonically like ObjectId values or timestamps. A good example of this is the default _id field, assuming it only contains ObjectID values.
To shard a collection using a hashed shard key, see Shard a Collection.
Hashed vs Ranged Sharding
Given a collection using a monotonically increasing value X as the shard key, using ranged sharding results in a distribution of incoming inserts similar to the following:
Since the value of X is always increasing, the chunk with an upper bound of maxKey receives the majority incoming writes. This restricts insert operations to the single shard containing this chunk, which reduces or removes the advantage of distributed writes in a sharded cluster.
By using a hashed index on X, the distribution of inserts is similar to the following:
Since the data is now distributed more evenly, inserts are efficiently distributed throughout the cluster.
Specify the Initial Number of Chunks
If you shard an empty collection using a hashed shard key, MongoDB automatically creates and migrates empty chunks so that each shard has two chunks. To control how many chunks MongoDB creates when sharding the collection, use shardCollection with the numInitialChunks parameter.
Warning
MongoDB hashed indexes truncate floating point numbers to 64-bit integers before hashing. For example, a hashed index would store the same value for a field that held a value of 2.3, 2.2, and 2.9. To prevent collisions, do not use a hashed index for floating point numbers that cannot be reliably converted to 64-bit integers (and then back to floating point). MongoDB hashed indexes do not support floating point values larger than 253.
See also
To learn how to deploy a sharded cluster and implement hashed sharding, see Deploy a Sharded Cluster.