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