Graph degree and the build- and query-time candidate list sizes were
constants, so a deployment had no way to trade recall against memory or
query speed. They are now `MemoryConfig::hnsw_m`,
`hnsw_ef_construction` and `hnsw_ef_search`, persisted with the store
and defaulting to exactly the previous behaviour (16, 64, and a query
list that scales with `k`).
Two things the straightforward version would have got wrong:
`clawhdf5-ann` asserts a graph degree of at least 2, so a configured 0 —
from a file, or from a caller reading 0 as "use the default" — aborted
the process inside the index builder. The store clamps instead, and a
test covers it: removing the clamp makes that test panic rather than
fail.
`ef_search` and the candidate pool handed to score fusion were the same
number. Tying the pool to the new setting would mean lowering `ef` for
speed also narrows what fusion sees, quietly degrading hybrid results
through a knob that looks like it only costs time. They are now
independent.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
`MemoryConfig::quantized_index` stores the HNSW index's own copy of the
embeddings as i8 rather than f32. At 100k x 384 that takes the index from
266 to 123 MiB and the whole reopened store from 399 to 256 MiB — 2.72x
to 1.74x the raw vectors, the largest remaining item in the footprint.
Quantised distances are approximate and `ef` cannot compensate, because
the loss is in the distances rather than in the graph: recall@10 tops out
at 0.967 against f32's 0.9995 and does not move between ef=128 and
ef=256. The store already holds the exact embeddings, though, so when the
index is quantised the query path re-scores the candidate pool against
them before fusion. That restores recall (0.9940 vs 0.9945 at ef=64) and
costs about 13% of QPS.
Off by default: it trades query speed for memory and which side is worth
more depends on the deployment. The flag is persisted in `/meta`, so a
reopened store does not silently revert to four times the index memory,
and the sidecar graph is rehydrated into the configured storage.
Also on the CLI as `create --quantized-index`.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
