The partition shift value is known internally to the Ring class as _part_shift. This value used to shift an MD5 hash to calculate the partition on which the data for that hash should reside. Only the top four bytes of the hash is used in this process. For example, to compute the partition for the path /account/container/object the Python code might look like: partition = unpack_from('>I', md5('/account/container/object').digest())[0] >>self._part_shift
OpenStack ManualsOpenStack Object Storage Administrator Manual - 1.4.3
