Well, they can be different beasts. First of all, different cores can have different schemas, which is not true of shards. Also, shards are almost assumed to be running on different machines as a scaling technique, whereas it multiple cores are run on a single Solr instance.
So using multiple cores is very similar to running multiple "virtual" Solr serves on a single machine, each independent of the other. This can make sense if, for instance, you wanted to have a bunch of small indexes all on one machine. You could use multiple cores rather than multiple instances of Solr. These indexes may or may not have anything to do with each other. Sharding, on the other hand, is almost always used to split a single logical index up amongst multiple machines in order to improve performance. The assumption usually is that the index is too big to give satisfactory performance on a single machine, so you'll split it into parts. That assumption really implies that it makes no sense to put multiple shards on the #same# machine. So really, the answer to your question is that you choose the right technique for the problem you're trying to solve. They aren't really different solutions to the same problem... Hope this helps. Erick On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 4:07 AM, Tri Nguyen <tringuye...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Hi, > > Was wondering about the pro's and con's of using sharding versus cores. > > An index can be split up to multiple cores or multilple shards. > > So why one over the other? > > Thanks, > > > tri