# Dynamically increase and decrease the number of connector instances

::: caution
These instructions only apply to outbound streaming connectors (streaming data out of Aerospike).
:::

You can dynamically increase the throughput of change-notification messages from your Aerospike database to your target system. You can do so by adding more instances of the outbound connector that you are using. Adding more instances also helps prevent traffic from slowing down excessively due to any failures of nodes on which connector instances are running.

If you find that any of the connector instances that you added dynamically are underused, you can also remove them dynamically.

For example, if you know that your Aerospike cluster has traffic spikes from time to time, you can prepare in advance to ensure that data continues to flow without bottlenecks through your connectors to your target system. You can have a number of additional connector instances configured and ready to run. Then, when traffic spikes, you can start and dynamically add them to the list of connector instances receiving change-notifications. When traffic returns to normal levels, you can dynamically remove the connector instances from that list.

You add connector instances by running the `asinfo` command with `action` set to `add`. This command persists the instances in memory only, and does not add them to the `xdr` section of the `/etc/aerospike/aerospike.conf` configuration file.

You remove connector instances that you added with the `asinfo` command by running this command again, but with `action` set to `remove`.

**Example of adding a connector instance**

```plaintext
asinfo -v "set-config:context=xdr;dc=connector;node-address-port=192.168.1.134:8080;action=add"
```

**Example of removing the same connector instance**

```plaintext
asinfo -v "set-config:context=xdr;dc=connector;node-address-port=192.168.1.134:8080;action=remove"
```

::: caution
Before the hotfix updates for Aerospike Database released on June 25, 2024, there was a bug affecting connector scaling in XDR configurations.

Without the update, if you dynamically removed a connector from a node in an XDR configuration, you needed to restart the XDR source node in order to propagate the connector change across all XDR nodes, or otherwise risk potential update delays due to imbalanced connector distribution until restart.

The update was released for the following Database versions:

-   [7.1.0.2](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/release/7-1-0-2)
-   [7.0.0.11](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/release/7-0-0-11)
-   [6.4.0.19](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/release/6-4-0-19)
-   [6.3.0.24](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/release/6-3-0-24)
-   [6.1.0.36](https://aerospike.com/docs/database/release/6-1-0-36)
:::