| name | qdrant-vertical-scaling |
| description | Guides Qdrant vertical scaling decisions. Use when someone asks 'how to scale up a node', 'need more RAM', 'upgrade node size', 'vertical scaling', 'resize cluster', 'scale up vs scale out', or when memory/CPU is insufficient on current nodes. Also use when someone wants to avoid the complexity of horizontal scaling. |
What to Do When Qdrant Needs to Scale Vertically
Vertical scaling means increasing CPU, RAM, or disk on existing nodes rather than adding more nodes. This is the recommended first step before considering horizontal scaling. Vertical scaling is simpler, avoids distributed system complexity, and is reversible.
- Vertical scaling for Qdrant Cloud is done through the Qdrant Cloud Console
- For self-hosted deployments, resize the underlying VM or container resources
When to Scale Vertically
Use when: current node resources (RAM, CPU, disk) are insufficient, but the workload doesn't yet require distribution.
- RAM usage approaching 80% of available memory (OS page cache eviction starts, severe performance degradation)
- CPU saturation during query serving or indexing
- Disk space running low for on-disk vectors and payloads
- A single node can handle up to ~100M vectors depending on dimensions and quantization
- For non-production workloads, which are tolerant to single-point-of-failure and don't require high availability
How to Scale Vertically in Qdrant Cloud
Vertical scaling is managed through the Qdrant Cloud Console.
- Log into Qdrant Cloud Console or use CLI tool
- Select the cluster to resize
- Choose a larger node configuration (more RAM, CPU, or both)
- The upgrade process involves a rolling restart with no downtime if replication is configured
- Ensure
replication_factor: 2 or higher before resizing to maintain availability during the rolling restart
