How does AutoShardedBot work in discord.py?

Question

Would someone explain how sharding works, specifically discord.ext.commands.AutoShardedBot? I put multiple questions below:

• Does it run on multiple servers?
• If not, how is it beneficial to shard it?
• Do guilds sometimes switch between shards?
• How do I use one database if the bot runs on multiple servers?

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

1. If by "multiple servers" you mean physical machines, no, it's a single python instance.
2. Discord requires sharding past 2.5k guilds.
3. Guilds are assigned to shard by (guild_id >> 22) % shard_count
4. Make the database accessible over the network, be sure to secure it with a strong password, connect to it from each.

if you need to split it to multiple machines, you can pass shard_id and shard_count to a normal Bot instance.

Discord Docs on Sharding