With high availability, only one Docker container is responsible for sending and receiving messages from WhatsApp servers. If messaging traffic exceeds the maximum throughput of a single Docker container, there will be backlog of message sends and message delivery latency will increase. To scale out the WhatsApp Business API Client, multiconnect supports sharding to spread loads across multiple Docker containers. Currently, WhatsApp only support static sharding with a shard number of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, or 32. High availability is a special case of multiconnect where the shard number is 1.