# Do you recommend OS or machines for large corpuses?

Datashare was created with scalability in mind which gave ICIJ the ability to index terabytes of documents.

To do so, we used a cluster of dozens of EC2 instances on AWS, running on Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. We used c4.8xlarge instances (36 CPUs / 60 GB RAM).

The most complex operation is OCR (we use [Apache Tesseract](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki)) so if your documents don't contain many images, it might be worth deactivating it (`--ocr false`).


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://icij.gitbook.io/datashare/usage/faq/general/do-you-recommend-os-or-machines-for-large-corpuses.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.