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VECTOR-DATABASES5 MIN READ

Walk the HNSW Tuning Trade-off

Tune HNSW using explicit recall, latency, and memory trade-offs.

SLO pressure p95 vector search latency is 410 ms. The target is 250 ms. The collection answers regulated policy questions. Changing HNSW parameters can improve speed while silently reducing retrieval quality. HNSW trade-off Latency, recall, memory: pick the constraint before the knob. HNSW search quality comes from graph connectivity and how much of the graph the query explores. More exploration can find better neighbors, but it costs time. More graph connectivity can help recall, but it costs memory. Shortcut Lower efSearch until p95 passes. A speed improvement that does not erase the product's quality promise. Do not tune approximate search…

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