Vector Indexing in Production: HNSW vs. DiskANN vs. IVF-PQ Architecture, Memory Footprint, and Search Economics
Vector Indexing in Production: HNSW vs. DiskANN vs. IVF-PQ Architecture, Memory Footprint, and Search Economics Scaling vector search beyond prototype deployments exposes a fundamental tension across three competing constraints: retrieval recall, query latency, and memory footprint. In high-dimensional representation spaces, exact k-nearest neighbor search via brute-force flat scans requires $O(N \cdot d)$ floating-point operations per query. For a corpus of 100 million 1536-dimensional FP32 em
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