Mongodb balancing very slow

Question

We are experiencing very slow balancing in our cluster. On our log, it seems that migration progress barely makes progress:

2016-01-25T22:21:15.907-0600 I SHARDING [conn142] moveChunk data transfer progress: { active: true, ns: "music.fav_artist_score", from: "rs1/MONGODB01-SRV:27017,MONGODB05-SRV:27017", min: { _id.u: -9159729253516193447 }, max: { _id.u: -9157438072680830290 }, shardKeyPattern: { _id.u: "hashed" }, state: "clone", counts: { cloned: 128, clonedBytes: 12419, catchup: 0, steady: 0 }, ok: 1.0 } my mem used: 0
2016-01-25T22:21:16.932-0600 I SHARDING [conn142] moveChunk data transfer progress: { active: true, ns: "music.fav_artist_score", from: "rs1/MONGODB01-SRV:27017,MONGODB05-SRV:27017", min: { _id.u: -9159729253516193447 }, max: { _id.u: -9157438072680830290 }, shardKeyPattern: { _id.u: "hashed" }, state: "clone", counts: { cloned: 128, clonedBytes: 12419, catchup: 0, steady: 0 }, ok: 1.0 } my mem used: 0
2016-01-25T22:21:17.957-0600 I SHARDING [conn142] moveChunk data transfer progress: { active: true, ns: "music.fav_artist_score", from: "rs1/MONGODB01-SRV:27017,MONGODB05-SRV:27017", min: { _id.u: -9159729253516193447 }, max: { _id.u: -9157438072680830290 }, shardKeyPattern: { _id.u: "hashed" }, state: "clone", counts: { cloned: 128, clonedBytes: 12419, catchup: 0, steady: 0 }, ok: 1.0 } my mem used: 0

Also, when we shard a new collection. It initially only starts with 8 chunks in the same primary replica set. It does not migrating chunks to other shards

Our configuration is 4 replica sets of (primary, secondary, arbiter) & 3 configs in a replica set. Both sh.getBalancerState() & sh.isBalancerRunning() return true

Answer 1

In MongoDB sharding performance depends upon the key chose for sharding the database. Since, your chunks are always stored on a single node it is highly probable that the shard key you have chosen is monotonically increasing . To avoid this issue, hash the key to allow proper balance of chunks across all the shards. Use the following command for hashed sharding.

sh.shardCollection( "<your-db>", { <shard-key>: "hashed" } )