Mongodb – Adding more space + bandwidth to a MongoDB cluster

1 - You can have more than 1 mongos instance and connect to whichever you want (the client driver should have that option). Nevertheless, a mongos is just a router, meaning it will only route the requests to the correct shard(s).

2 - Yes, a config server can be in the same machine as a primary/secondary, just don't put config instances together (you are required to have 3 because of redundancy).

3 - A replica set is a group consisting of 1 primary and N secondaries. If you are sharding, each group will be a shard. That means that the single primary and all secondaries of the same group will have the same data (replicated). Also, having more secondaries won't help you increase the write performance as only the primary is able to do perform inserts/updates/deletes. Considering this, the only way to increase the write performance is by having more shards (horizontal scaling) and, of course, choosing a good sharding key that will balance data across all shards (you don't want all your data to be in 1 shard and all others remain empty). For further info check this official doc explaining the concept of replica set and its members http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/replica-set-members/

Also, instances of a replica set shard (the primary and N secondaries) are not required to be in the same machine. You might want to put them in separated machines to increase redundancy and perhaps have a better distribution of the load.

OK, flights.flight is sharded but basically only has one chunk so far, and hence all current data is on one shard and so all writes can only go to one shard - you will need more before the collection can be balanced across multiple shards. Unless you pre-split (something like this) or use a hashed shard key (which you are not) then the mongos process is what is responsible for automatically splitting the chunks.

It will attempt the first split after it has seen writes of approximately 20% of the max chunk size (default is 64MiB, so 20% is ~13MiB). It looks like this has not yet happened, or has failed for some reason in your case.

It should be noted that although the mongos will track all the writes, it will lose its "history" if restarted. It should also be noted that the config servers must be up and working for any splits to happen. Check the mongos logs for any evidence of split failures or similar.

If you want to kick start things manually, just pick two (or more) reasonable split points and use the splitAt() command to break up your current single chunk. You can then wait for the balancer to move things, or you can move them manually with the moveChunk() command. You can find examples of this in the answer to the question I linked above.