Mongodb: slow shard balancing I've decided to shard a collection with 500M+ documents into 24 shards. All shards are on the same machine without replicas as was advised in this title (core sharding). The shard key is {"_id":1}. I encountered, that chunk migration is extremely slow. It have been processing 2 days and progress is about 30%. I tried to move chunks manually. I stopped the balancer and executed commands from this title But it seems to me that nothing happened. I started the balancer again and it continue to migrate chunks in the same way. Is there any method to make it faster?
Math first: you moved 150M documents in 2 days, which is roughly 860 documents per second including metadata and indices, where reading and writing all occurs on the same machine. That is not what I would call slow. The description coming to my mind is "lightning fast". ;)

Since there is no real distribution of the write load, an easy way to speed things up is to add two or more machines.

A few notes: sharding production data on non-replica shards is dangerous, to say the least. If one of the shards fails, the data contained is permanently unavailable until you get the shard up and running again. Plus, since there was no server to write to for a specific key range, values of that range can not be written. If the shard was a replica set, the failure would lead to the election of a new primary, to which all writes and (depending on the configuration) most or even all reads would go.

_id can be used as a shard key, however it should be hashed.