sharding.md

Sharding

Sharding is the method by which a bot's code is "split" into multiple instances of itself. When a bot is sharded, each shard handles only a certain percentage of all the guilds the bot is on.

{% hint style="info" %} You do not need to worry about sharding until your bot hits around 2,400 guilds. YOU MUST SHARD before you hit 2,500 guilds, however. {% endhint %}

Sharding Caveats

There are additional difficulties when sharding a bot that add complexity to your code (one of the reasons you shouldn't shard too early).

• Collections do not cache data from all shards, so you can't grab data from a guild in another shard easily.
• In order to do anything across shards you need to worry about using broadcastEval and such (tutorial comming soon!).
• Sharded bots often gain very marginal performance increase and might even use more memory due to using more node processes.
• If you're using any sort of database or connection, multiple shards may cause issues with multiple processes connecting to a single end point.

Example Sharding Code

/*
    The following code goes into it's own file, and you run this file
    instead of your main bot file.
*/

const Discord = require('discord.js');
const Manager = new Discord.ShardingManager('./YOUR_BOT_FILE_NAME.js');
Manager.spawn(2); // This example will spawn 2 shards (5,000 guilds);

Example Sharding Code 2

const { ShardingManager } = require('discord.js');

const manager = new ShardingManager(`./YOUR_BOT_FILE_NAME.js`, {token: 'Your Secret Token Here'});

manager.spawn(2).then(() => {// This example will spawn 2 shards (5,000 guilds);
    manager.on('shardCreate', shard => console.log(`Successfully launched shard ${shard.id}`));
    console.log(`Launched ${manager.totalShards} shards...`);
    
}).catch((err) => {
    console.log(err);
});